The Ten, a group of ten American painters, first exhibit together in 1898, in New York City.

The members are Childe Hassam, John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Thomas W. Dewing, Joseph DeCamp, Frank W. Benson, Willard Leroy Metcalf, Edmund Charles Tarbell, Robert Reid, and E.E. Simmons.

Most members of the group paint in an Impressionist style.

Although their work does not differ radically in technique or subject matter from that of the artists who participate in the large annual exhibitions of the Society of American Artists and the National Academy of Design, they choose to exhibit independently, hoping to draw public attention to their paintings.

All are former members of the Society of American Artists.

Winslow Homer had declined an invitation to join the group; Abbott Handerson Thayer had accepted membership but withdrew before the group's first exhibition.

Winslow Homer, sixty-two in 1898, is by the late 1890s generally recognized as one of the leading American painters, and his work brings top prices.

His subjects, often deceptively simple on the surface, deal in their most serious moments with the theme of man's efforts to establish his humanness in the face of an indifferent universe.

A black man lies inert on the deck of a small sailboat in Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream, based upon studies made during Homer's two winter trips to the Bahamas in 1884­-85 and 1898­-99.

A hurricane has shredded the sails, snapped off the mast, and snatched away the rudder.

Unlike the boys in Breezing Up or the fisherman in Fog Warning, this man is powerless to control his vessel.

He is at the mercy of the elements.

Sharks circle the boat, a waterspout hovers in the distance, and a boat on the distant horizon passes by unseeing and unseen.

As in Stephen Crane's comparable short story, The Open Boat, nature is seen as not caring whether a man lives or dies.