Eagle Head

Winslow Homer painted this seaside scene in 1870, capturing a breezy afternoon at Eagle Head along the Massachusetts coast near Manchester. Three young women have just stepped out of the surf. One leans forward to squeeze the seawater from her long hair, another pulls a dark cloak tight against the wind, and a third sits on the sand tugging at her stocking. A little dog trots across the beach, giving the whole moment an easy, lived-in feeling. Homer, an American painter celebrated for his honest views of ordinary life and later for his dramatic seascapes, had a sharp eye for natural light and unrehearsed gestures, and both are on full display here.

The painting ruffled some feathers when it first went on view. A young woman shown in a clinging, wet bathing dress felt too daring for the tastes of the day, and one critic went so far as to call her pose "ungainly." Seen now, the scene is remarkably calm and unremarkable, which makes all that old outrage rather amusing. The real charm lies in Homer's choice of subject at all. A plain afternoon at the shore was exactly the sort of thing most painters of his time would have ignored, yet he found it worth setting down in paint.