The Light House Nassau
By Winslow Homer, 1899
Alone on a wide stretch of ocean, a man sits in a slim canoe with his back turned to us, one arm lifted toward the horizon as if signaling or reaching for something out of sight. Water fills nearly the whole picture, rendered in cool blues and greens with foamy white crests that seem to roll and ripple. Off in the distance sits a small lighthouse flying a red flag, marking the way into Nassau harbor in the Bahamas. A modest haul of what might be shells or sponges rests in the bottom of his boat, a quiet clue about the man's daily labor along this coast.
Winslow Homer ranks among America's finest watercolorists, and this piece, painted in 1899, shows exactly why. He made several trips to the Bahamas during the 1880s and 1890s, pulled in by the strong sunlight and the ordinary lives of the islanders. Watercolor suited these fleeting moods of sky and sea perfectly, and Homer worked the medium with a looseness that fellow painters admired. His clever use of bare paper, left untouched to stand in for foam and glinting reflections, gives the whole scene its bright, open air.
The honesty of the image is its real strength. Instead of piling on drama, Homer offers a simple truth: a man perfectly at ease in his surroundings, poised between the endless water and the promise of land that the lighthouse holds out to him.
