The Gulf Stream (painting) - Interpretation and Influences

Interpretation and Influences

Homer's intentions for the The Gulf Stream are opaque. the painting has been described as "a particularly enigmatic and tantalizing episode, a marine puzzle that floats forever in a region of unsolved mysteries." Bryson Burroughs, a onetime curator at the Metropolitan Museum, noted that it "assumes the proportion of a great allegory if one chooses". Its drama is of a romantic and heroic vein, the man stoically resigned to fate, surrounded by anecdotal detail reminiscent of Homer's early illustrative works.

When a viewer requested an explanation for the narrative, Homer fairly bristled in response:

"I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description....I have crossed the Gulf Stream ten times & I should know something about it. The boat & sharks are outside matters of very little consequence. They have been blown out to sea by a hurricane. You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who now is so dazed & parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily."

The painting alludes to John Singleton Copley's 1778 composition, Watson and the Shark, as well as a handful of dramatic marine paintings of the 19th century. In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Robert Hughes contrasts Homer's picture with Copley's. While Copley's shark jaw is alien in form and most likely drawn from second-hand accounts, Homer's— owing to the artist's familiarity with the subject— correctly captures the shark's anatomy. Secondly, in Copley's version, a rescue is imminent: the horizon is near and light in tone, and many boats, within the harbor and probably docked, are seen in the background. Homer's version, with its circling sharks, broken mast, lone figure, looming water spout, and open sea give a sense of abandonment. The ship at far left is so distant as to suggest that society, while present, is completely unattainable; it presents the viewer with a so-close-yet-so-far situation. These two paintings contrast in their immediacy as well. In Watson and the Shark there is constant movement: the boat moving forward, the downward thrust of the spear, the two men reaching down for the victim, and finally the shark which extends off the canvas. In Homer's painting, the scene is more static: the sharks seem to swim slowly around the boat which lolls in a trough between waves.

References to other 19th-century paintings, including The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix, The Slave Ship by J. M. W. Turner, and The Voyage of Life by Thomas Cole have been noted as well. These three paintings (in the case of the Delacroix, a preliminary study) were in one of the finest public art collections in America in the mid 19th century, that of John Taylor Johnston of New York, and it is likely that Homer was familiar with the paintings; one of his own works, Prisoners from the Front, was in the same collection. For art historian Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., The Gulf Stream is more richly informed by these artistic predecessors than by Homer's direct experiences at sea, with the circling sharks derived from the tortured souls of The Barque of Dante, the dramatic sea and sky inspired by The Slave Ship, and the "mode of pictorial utterance" akin to The Voyage of Life.

Elements in the painting have been interpreted as possessing funereal references: in addition to the black cross in the boat's bow, the open hatch (representing a tomb), ropes (for lowering the body), broken mast and torn sail (shroud) have been cited for symbolic meanings. By contrast, the boat in Homer's painting Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) of 1876 featured an anchor in its bow, symbolic of hope. The sailor in The Gulf Stream ignores these allusions, as he pays no heed to the sharks, waterspout, nor the ship in the distance, and inverts the optimism of the romantic masterpiece Raft of the Medusa painted earlier in the century by Théodore Géricault.

Homer biographer Albert Ten Eyck Gardner believed The Gulf Stream was the artist's greatest painting, and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann called it "one of the greatest pictures ever painted in America". Later assessments have been more critical of the "almost excessive pathos of the drama." John Updike thought the painting "famous but on the edge of the absurd, with its overkill of sharks and waterspout". For Sidney Kaplan, a scholar on black American culture, The Gulf Stream is the "masterpiece of the black image— the deathless Negro waiting stoically, Homerically for his end between waterspout and white-bellied shark." Peter H. Wood has written a book interpreting the painting as an allegory of the situation of blacks in America during the slave trade and afterwards.