Winslow Homer, who has worked for the past three years in watercolor, explores and resolves new artistic problems.

His paintings of this period, such as Breezing Up [A Fair Wind] (1876), National Gallery of Art, Washington), reflect the invigorating effect of the demanding medium.

Winslow Homer has matured slowly as an artist, but his development has been constant.

With the passage of years, his oil paintings have become larger, his figures more solitary, his concern for naturalistic detail greater.

He paints many women, increasingly as single figures, intimate, withdrawn, feminine.

From the late 1870s, Homer begins to devote his summers exclusively to direct painting from nature in watercolor.

Greater concern for atmospheric effects and reflected light add complexity to the images but at the same time enable him to achieve greater pictorial unity.

The American painter Winslow Homer had received some recognition during his early years, but has not had any real success by midcareer.

By 1880, he had begun to show signs of increasing antisociality, deliberately shunning the company of other people.

In 1881 he unexpectedly goes to England, where he sketches and paints in Tynemouth, a remote fishing port on the North Sea.

Winslow Homer, now forty-six, has commenced his period of greatest artistic growth in Tynemouth.

He is intrigued by the life of the hardy fisherfolk of Tynemouth, who struggle against the sea to earn their livelihood, but he does not paint that struggle directly.

He depicts instead the robust and courageous women of Tynemouth, who mend the nets, keep house, and wait for their men to return from the sea.

The English coastal atmosphere poses a new and difficult artistic challenge, but Homer masters the diffused light, limited in color but infinitely varied in tone, in a series of subtle watercolors.

The sea becomes the dominant theme in Winslow Homer's work after his return to America in 1883.

He moves to Prouts Neck, a fishing village on the bleak, desolate coast of Maine.

He travels extensively but always returns to his Prouts Neck studio to convert his sketches into major paintings.

Solitude becomes for Homer not simply a preference but an absolute necessity, as he turns his mind and his art to subjects dealing with man's fate in confronting the elemental forces of nature.

Winslow Homer now paints his large, impressive (and immediately popular) painting The Life Line (1884, Philadelphia Museum of Art), one of several he does at this time on the rescue theme, depicting the dramatic transfer of an unconscious female from a wrecked ship to shore.

He had seen a demonstration in Atlantic City of the use of a breeches buoy for rescue from the sea in the summer of the previous year.

Winslow Homer's interest has begun to shift from the edge of the sea to the sea itself.

Perhaps inspired by a putative trip to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Canada, with a fishing fleet, he paints heroic men in the act of pitting their strength, intelligence, and experience against the mighty sea.

In the most impressive of these works, Fog Warning (1885, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), night is falling, fog is rolling in, and a lone fisherman in a dory calculates the distance and the time remaining for him to get back to his home ship in safety.

Winslow Homer's fishermen and their women are heroic in their confrontations with the physical world, but the artist occasionally takes a more jaundiced view of his fellowman.

A Huntsman and Dogs (1891; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania), set in a cheerless autumnal landscape with a sullen-faced young hunter, pausing on a hillside leveled by timbering and blackened by fire, epitomizes man as a despoiler of nature, killing for trophies rather than food.

The monumental narrative paintings he has produced in his Maine studio from the mid-1880s lack the freshness of his earlier works, but Homer simultaneously paints innumerable brilliantly colored watercolors during his travels north to Canada and south to the Caribbean.

Winslow Homer abandons the human subject entirely in The Fox Hunt (1893; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia).

A fox ventures forth to forage for berries on the snow-covered land, and a sinister line of starved black crows converges to attack him.

The ensuing life-and-death struggle will be over quickly, but the pulse of nature that drives the winter ocean against the cliffs in the distance will go on forever.

Winslow Homer successfully weds the freshness of his watercolors to the power of his oils to achieve an impressive pictorial effect in Northeaster that (as in many of his later works) transcends the subject matter.

When Homer first shows this canvas in 1895, it includes two men in foul-weather gear crouching on the rocks below a smaller column of spray.

The painting is well received and purchased by a leading collector of American art—George Hearn, who will later donate it to the Metropolitan Museum—but Homer subsequently reworks it to powerful effect.