The Herring Net

Two years after returning from the coast of Northumberland, Winslow Homer settled beside the sea at Prout’s Neck, Maine, and turned at last to the open Atlantic itself. It was in 1885 that he painted The Herring Net, joining the sequence of open-ocean pictures — from Breezing Up to The Fog Warning — with which he remade American marine painting in the 1880s, dignifying the hard labour of men upon the water with a gravity the national school had not attempted. The canvas also established the unsentimental relationship with the sea that Homer would pursue for the rest of his life, and it remains among the most admired of his Maine years. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.