Winslow Homer at the Met

I have been looking forward to today for weeks now.  I went into the city and met Stan and we went to the Winslow Homer exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It is a stunning exhibit of his paintings and watercolors, having gathered many of his well known paintings from museums around the country!  that was the only exhibit we looked at and when paying attention, it can take hours to see everything.

Here are two of my very favorite paintings in the whole world!  This one is titled "Fog Warning" showing a lone fisherman in a dory, with some fish in the boat and he sees the fog coming in in the distance and the schooner he came from a long way off.  There is such a feeling for foreboding - will he make it back to the mother ship before the fog arrives.

This painting is called "The Lifeline" and it shows a woman being rescued from a ship that has been wrecked on rocks offshore.  The men of the Life Brigade shoot a line with a canon from shore out to the wreck, it gets tied to the ship, and then the rescuer is pulled out to the ship, then he takes on one of the passengers, and is pulled back to shore through the surf.  He does that over and over until all the people are rescued.  What is powerful in this painting is the woman's scarf covers the face of the rescuer and he, who is a hero, becomes anonymous.  There is no painter who can better paint the many moods of the sea than Winslow Homer!  What was important about the visit today, is that I have known these two paintings for many years.  One of them I first saw at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the other at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  And today they were nearly side by side, and I stood in front of them and was so moved by being in the presence of the original paintings.  It was a very powerful experience.