When queried about the meaning of The Gulf Stream, the seascape at the heart of the National Gallery鈥檚 current exhibition, its painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910) directed 鈥渢hese inquisitive schoolmarms鈥 to the oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury who had described the Atlantic current as 鈥渁 balance-wheel.鈥澨 Maury further explained that the Gulf Stream is an 鈥渆xpression of One Thought, a unity with harmonies which One Intelligence, and One Intelligence alone, could utter.鈥澨 The picture鈥檚 power depends on its ambiguity: tension coexists with hope.
Although Homer is best known for his marine paintings, his deepest immersion into the 鈥渦nity with harmonies鈥 was amid the freshwater wilderness he found over 40 years in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.听 His biographer William R. Cross will discuss these subjects, and the process of writing his recently released Winslow Homer: American Passage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), at The Courtauld.
William R. Cross is an independent scholar and a consultant to art and history museums. He served as the curator of Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter鈥檚 Journey, 1869鈥1880, a 2019 exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum on the formation of Winslow Homer as a marine painter. He is the chairman of the advisory board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
William Cross will also give a broader overview of Homer鈥檚 life and work at the National Gallery at 1 pm on 26 October:
Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld)听
