This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career. Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This groundbreaking publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas—in particular, The Gulf Stream (1899), an iconic painting long considered the most consequential of his career—revealing a lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. The book also includes Homer’s depictions of rural life and the sea, in which he grapples with the violence of nature, as well as his Civil War and Reconstruction paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, which explore the unresolved effects of the war on the landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. Recognizing the artist’s keen ability to distill complex issues in his work, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer’s work resonates with the challenges of the present day.

In their dynamic compositions and richly textured passages, Homer’s late seascapes capture the look and feel (and even suggest the sound) of masses of onrushing and receding water.

“The sea is a universal realm, and it's a place that we don't really understand.”

Met staff reflect on artworks that have brought them solace, from a Winslow Homer painting to ancient board games.

Join curators Stephanie Herdrich and Sylvia Yount for a virtual tour of _Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents_, which reconsiders Homer’s work through the lens of conflict, a theme that crosses his prolific career.

Starting in 2015, three remarkable watercolors by Emil Gilliéron were studied and conserved, after more than seventy years in storage, to prepare them for the exhibition Watercolors of the Acropolis: Émile Gilliéron in Athens. See how they did it.