Winslow Homer was born in Boston in 1836
into a middle-class family, a mother with an interest in art,
who encouraged him.
He himself had his early training in engraving.
Homer found work with 'Harper's Weekly',
which was one of the most popular middle-class magazines
which made great use of illustrations in the publication.
When Civil War broke out in 1861,
that suddenly became the consuming interest
of America and of 'Harper's Weekly'.
Homer was sent to the Union Army front in Virginia,
where he was embedded with the troops.
He was one of about thirty artists who were covering the war,
producing a steady stream of images,
but his were always among the most powerful and direct.
It's at that time that we see his first finished oil
that he debuts publicly that engages a Civil War subject,
and that is his 'Sharpshooter' painting.
This work is so powerful because he's meditating
on the moral and human stakes of this war.
It is a very menacing image.
Homer himself said it was as close to murder
as anything he'd ever seen.
Homer understood that often the most powerful image
would derive from focusing in
with great attention on specific details
which he rendered with great directness.
He once said, ‘When you paint,
try to put down exactly what you see.
Whatever else you have to offer will come out anyway.’
Homer is seeing the war in all its dimensions,
from the boredom and hunger of camp life
to the terror and visceral terms of the violence of battle.
Homer likely suffered some type of trauma following this event.
His mother, Henrietta Homer,
writes that when Winslow Homer came home,
he was so changed that his best friends did not know him.
So after the Civil War ended in 1865,
there's a period of what's called Reconstruction,
and it’s all about reintegrating the Southern states.
I think Homer realised that the Civil War
had not solved America's problems.
Reconstruction wasn't working.
And he became fascinated
with depicting post-war African-American life
and hinting that their lot was still a very difficult one.
It is Homer addressing a new dynamic,
a new social relationship that people are trying to negotiate.
In 'The Cotton Pickers',
we have these two women in the field
beautifully rendered by Homer.
However, we have to remember that a lot of them
basically were forced to become labourers
once again on the farms of the same plantations
that they worked on during slavery.
They are still living in a deeply racist world.
We see the rise of things like the Ku Klux Klan,
the Jim Crow laws, that are just another way
of almost policing African Americans.
These are people who are actually still
under kind of forms of slavery.
So I guess the question is, to what extent could he truly
understand the lives that he was depicting?
In 1881, Homer decided to come to England.
But after only about a week in London,
he goes up to Cullercoats on the North Sea.
A fishing village, it was the site of one of the lifesaving brigades
and it was also an artists' colony.
And I think Homer imagined
he would find interesting subjects there.
My connection with Winslow Homer is my grandmother,
Maggie Jefferson, was painted by him several times.
She was his favourite model. His muse.
'Fisher Girl with Net' is, I think, on this pier here,
and I can see her coming along there with the net.
I like the way she's strong-willed.
I like the style of her, the way she holds herself.
I like the swirl of the skirt.
It's my favourite painting of all time.
The fishergirls would have been down here from early morning.
They would have had creels and babies on their back.
Bold, fearless, they always wore a nice scarf
like a cravat and a paisley blouse.
There was nothing drab about them.
They were only 14 or 15 years of age.
That gives me a lot of pride
to think that these girls in their poverty
could rise above it all and make something of them
and still be immortalised today.
There are some paintings such as
'The Gale' or 'Inside the Bar'
where you can see these beautiful, monumental,
but also graceful women
bracing themselves against the strong winds.
There's a sense of waiting and hope and also fear
for these women who don't know if their men
will come back or not from sea.
The families who lived in Cullercoats in Homer’s time,
they were all God-fearing folk,
and each family had a pattern for their jumper
because when some fishermen came in drowned,
they would know which family he was from
by the pattern on his jumper.
Cullercoats was the perfect spot for Homer
to record and to observe what was called at the time
the theme of ‘Perils at Sea’.
Drownings and shipwrecks were a daily occurrence.
We know that between the 20th and the 22nd of October 1881,
a big ship called the 'Iron Crown' foundered
at the mouth of the Tyne.
As soon as Homer heard the alarm
he made his way to the shore
and he started sketching.
The rescuers themselves provided Homer
with good artistic material.
In a painting like 'The Life Brigade',
he depicted all these men looking at the horizon, at the sea,
and we don't know what they are looking at,
but there is this sense of anticipation
and waiting and trepidation,
which is part of the way Homer
constructed the narrative of his paintings.
In the summer of 1883, Homer goes to the Maine coast;
rocks and waves crashing,
a very simple life, very austere, very elemental
in its confrontation with raw nature.
And that will feed his art for decades to come.
So we're standing in Winslow Homer's studio home,
which is perched on the rocky coast of Maine
in a town called Prouts Neck,
which bore a great deal of similarity to Cullercoats
in the sense that it was also a fishing community, also coastal,
and he produces some of his most celebrated
iconic works in oil in this very spot.
At about this point, Homer begins to go south
to the Caribbean every winter - Florida, Cuba,
Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda - to observe life there.
Many of the works are watercolours.
Very bright colour enters into his vocabulary,
sun-drenched scenes, but at the same time
he's interested in depicting particularly life of
the Black residents of those islands.
Winslow Homer painted 'The Gulf Stream' in 1899.
He is 63 at the time of its making.
This is Homer’s legacy picture.
He is depicting a lone Black sailor
who is in a state of peril,
in a damaged sailboat, lost at sea.
He writes on the bow of the boat,
so we can make no mistake, 'Key West'.
This is an American boat,
this is an American figure who is in peril,
surrounded by sharks in the water;
an almost elemental scene of imminent demise,
one of the strongest pictures of his career.
The sail is slipping off to the side, useless,
with nothing but several stalks of sugar cane
to sustain him, a predominant commodity
and product of enslaved labour in the Americas
and the West Indies trade.
When you think of 'The Gulf Stream', you think of the currents
that allowed for things like the triangular trade
and the slave trade.
From Homer's perspective, he thinks he's rendering
this larger than life, poignant figure.
But what he's also doing
is putting his own perspective
of what that kind of heroism is.
It becomes almost an allegory of what he sees
as the present fate of African Americans.
We do not know if he is going to be saved.
Will that ship see and rescue this man?
The possibility is there, but Homer doesn't tell us.
Every time I look at the painting 'The Gulf Stream'
all I see is how it's really relevant to today,
to contemporary society.
I think of forced migrants crossing the Mediterranean,
migration of Cubans to America and the loss of life along the way.
What it captures is the continued imbalance of power
that often falls along ethnic and racial lines.
Paintings like 'The Gulf Stream'
have captured the imagination
and the collective consciousness of many people,
especially African Americans and African-American artists
and thinkers and researchers.
I first learned of Winslow Homer's 'Gulf Stream' painting
via another painting that was in response
to Homer's painting by Kerry James Marshall,
which depicts four Black figures
sailing on calm waters, enjoying their time
in control of their own destiny.
And that sparked me to want to find out
more about Homer's painting
that was the catalyst to this artwork.
I wanted to make a piece that was conscious
of these ideas of both artworks,
but also creating something altogether new
that can function as a sculpture that could transform itself
as viewers like see it from a distance.
It goes from being a boat
to being this anthropomorphic vessel
that has this structural system made of 12 ribs,
and with a spinal column to the viewer,
we see the title of the 'Gulf Stream'
on the stern that might spark an idea
of greater connectivity or research
in terms of the notion of 'The Gulf Stream'
and the slave trade paths
that connect with the sculpture.
Homer becomes increasingly enamoured with the ocean,
to such an extent that he begins to really remove
and omit the sense of human narrative from his works
and rather focus on the grandeur
and awesome power of cresting waves
and the sort of ceaseless beating
of their rhythms across the coast.
And he's interested in different timescales and questions
of geological time and the broader universe of nature
and man's small place within it.
Late Homer is focusing on the elemental in nature,
the thing from which nothing more can be subtracted.
It is just archetypal confrontation.
His ability to manipulate paint
and that technical power meeting
with the simplicity of the theme
represents his final great statement.
Homer fabricated a sort of Romantic ideal
of this isolated, introspective artist.
Here at the studio, he featured a sign that is iconic
that says 'snakes, snakes, mice'
to ward off unwitting visitors.
And his door knocker was the head of Medusa,
safeguarding his privacy, warning against visitors,
but it's always with a wink
and it's always with a sense of humour.
He was living most of the time in great isolation,
shunning most people.
But I always think that he kept his eye
on the train schedules back to New York,
and he could get there quickly
and carry on his business.
He wanted to be a very successful,
financially remunerative artist,
so he is producing the kinds of images
that his essentially American clientele did indeed respond to.
Arguably, Homer was the most famous
living American artist when he died in 1910
and very interestingly, most artists' reputations
undergo decline after their death.
Homer's never has.
He paints wonderful images of sociability,
of children playing, etc., etc.,
but throughout his life he keeps returning
to those moments of conflict, of contestation,
war, racial relationships, violence,
the peril of mankind confronted with nature.
These are issues we continue to deal with
and we are realising how forthrightly
Homer did so more than a century ago.