Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) [SEP] creator
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) is an oil painting by American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a catboat called the "Gloucester" chopping through that city's harbor under "a fair wind" (Homer's original title). Inside the boat are a man, three boys, and their catch. 
Homer began the canvas in New York in 1873, after he had visited Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he first worked in watercolor. He used the sketches made there,
boat in Homer's painting "Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)" of 1876 featured an anchor in its bow, symbolic of hope.
The sailor in "The Gulf Stream" ignores these allusions, as he pays no heed to the sharks, waterspout, nor the ship in the distance, and inverts the optimism of the romantic masterpiece "Raft of the Medusa" painted earlier in the century by Théodore Géricault.
Homer biographer Albert Ten Eyck Gardner believed "The Gulf Stream" was the artist's greatest painting