Hidden Beneath the Surface: Atlantic Slavery in Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream

In 1981, I published a paper about Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream,” suggesting that the famous painting had relevant, but unrecognized, ties to the black experience.  One critical art commentator [Roger Kimball, The Rape of the Masters (2004), chapter 5] has cited my essay as the beginning of recent (he believes, misguided) scholarly interest in Homer’s images of blacks.  That interest continues, and I eventually published a book on this enigmatic painting, created in 1899.  But, given the separation of disciplines that plagues academia, historians are still largely unaware of the historical aspects of this famous picture, which has hung in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than a century. Since 2010 marks the centennial of Winslow Homer’s death, it seems a suitable time to change this awareness and re-examine Homer’s “Gulf Stream” in terms of his career, and in light of four decades of intensive research into African American history and the Black Atlantic.  Within this context, it is now possible to “look beneath the surface” of this renowned painting and see the wider implications of several of its central features.  For the picture’s Atlantic setting is between the Caribbean and North America, and a square rigged ship and an ominous storm appear in the background.  Significantly, the solitary black man, adrift on a small boat, is closely linked to sharks, which are a powerful icon of the Middle Passage.  Beside him on the deck, at the center of the painting, are stalks of sugar cane, the profitable plant that lies at the very inception and heart of the enslavement process for Africans in the Americas.  This presentation, illustrated with images, will remind historians of the complex resonances that this important painting contains for a culture still struggling to come to terms with its troubled Afro-Atlantic past.