Fog Warning
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Homer painted "The Fog Warning" in 1885, in oil on a 30-1/4 x 48-1/2-inch canvas. He placed it with Doll and Richards, Boston, in 1886. It was subsequently purchased by Miss Laura and Grenville H. Norcross, and in 1894 was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through the Otis Norcross Fund (MFA information). It is currently exhibited at the MFA in the Fenway Stairs area.
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer was born in 1836 in Boston, although he and his family moved several times during his childhood. As a young man, he worked first as an illustrator and made many studies of the Civil War, including the prisoners in the camps and the return of the soldiers to their homes after the war. He traveled to Paris in 1867, where he was exposed to the works of the great European artists. When he returned to America, he painted many scenes of everyday life, in an optimistic and rather idealistic mode . In the 1880s he spent some time on the coast of England where he began to paint the sea. Then he moved back to New England, eventually settling in Prout's Neck, Maine, where he lived for the rest of his life, other than for winters spent in the Bahamas. In the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf Stream, he found his mature subject matter, and used the majestic power of the sea to portray man's defiance of the elements.
The Fog Warning
"The Fog Warning", painted after his move to Prout's Neck, was inspired by the unusually large harvest of fish in 1883. The canvas is dominated by the solitary fisherman, struggling to reach the ship before he loses sight of it in the heavy fog that is rolling in on the horizon.The stern of his dory is almost swamped in the choppy seas by the weight of the huge fish that he has caught. Although he has conquered the fish, the sea may prove to defeat him in turn. There is a sense of the following in Homer's painting:
- Isolation and hardship
- Of the futility of trying to pit oneself against nature
- The nobility of trying to overcome nature