The Fog Warning

A lone fisherman in a dory turns from hauling his catch to measure the bank of fog closing over the horizon, his oars raised as he rows back toward the distant schooner. Winslow Homer painted this scene in 1885, in the first years of his self-imposed exile at Prout’s Neck, Maine, where he had turned from illustration to the severe study of the sea. The picture’s almost monumental quiet, its deep knowledge of sailing and its unsparing realism about the dangers of the fisherman’s trade make it one of the great marine paintings of the American century.