A small sailboat skims along in the breeze, its hull heeling, foam at the bow. At the tiller, a boy fixes his eyes on the horizon. Two others lie stretched out in the boat, and a young man, seated amidships, holds the sheet. Overhead is a vast sky swept with clouds; far off to the right, a schooner. There is an energy and a confidence in this picture that have made it one of the best-loved images in American painting.
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The painting took a long time to find its name. Shown in 1876 as A Fair Wind, it was listed in books of the following years as a plain Sail Boat, before appearing in 1887 under the title that stuck, Breezing Up: the wind freshening. Today the National Gallery of Art in Washington keeps both names together.
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Homer finished it in 1876, the year the United States celebrated the centennial of its independence, eleven years after the end of the Civil War. For three years he had reworked it, corrected it, pared it down, as if trying to capture something larger than an afternoon on the water.
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It all began in Gloucester, the Massachusetts fishing port north of Boston, where Homer spent the summer of 1873. It was there, among the harbor children and the light of the bay, that watercolor became far more than an exercise for him: a true means of expression.
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He painted mostly boys: on the wharves, in dories, at the water’s edge, eyes turned toward the sea. From that stay date a watercolor and an oil sketch that already contain the motif of the painting, a small boat sailed by children before the wind.
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The following year, in 1874, Homer turned it into a small oil on wood about a foot wide, The Flirt, now also in the National Gallery of Art. The boat’s name, Flirt, is painted on its transom; in Breezing Up, Homer renamed it Gloucester, tying the scene to the port where it all began.
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The catboat, a small single-masted sailboat common along the New England coast, was the everyday craft of fishermen and summer visitors alike. By choosing this ordinary boat rather than a grand vessel, Homer rooted his subject in the daily life of the coast.
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Comparing the two pictures, together with the infrared examination of Breezing Up carried out by the National Gallery of Art, shows how Homer turned a pleasant scene into a powerful image.
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In The Flirt, a grown man dressed in red holds the tiller. In Breezing Up, the tiller passes to a young boy, and Homer even moved it into a riskier position. The change is decisive: now a child is steering the boat, while the eldest simply minds the sheet.
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Infrared reveals other second thoughts. As in The Flirt, a boy originally sat in the bow; Homer painted him out and put an anchor in his place. He had also included two schooners in the background, then covered one, keeping only the one at the right.
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Every one of these decisions points the same way: fewer figures, more space, a cleaner diagonal. The anchor, a traditional symbol of hope, adds a discreet note that the National Gallery of Art reads as a possible echo of the painting’s idealism.
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La coque forme une grande diagonale qui traverse la composition. Le m\u00e2t s’incline, la voile se gonfle, l’eau gicle \u00e0 l’\u00e9trave, et chaque figure \u00e9pouse le mouvement : les gar\u00e7ons allong\u00e9s font contrepoids, le jeune homme se penche pour retenir l’\u00e9coute, le barreur se cale contre le bord\u00e9. On sent le poids du vent dans la toile. <\/p>\n\n
The rest of the picture is remarkably restrained. The deep green sea is flecked with whitecaps; the sky, very present, fills with scudding clouds. In the bottom of the boat a few fish show that the outing has gone well. Nothing threatens: the wind is fair, the crew relaxed, the horizon clear.
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Homer paints with a sailor’s precision. The heel of the hull, the strain of the sail, the way the boat cuts through the swell are rendered with an accuracy that anyone who sails recognizes at once. That exactness, joined to the simplicity of the staging, gives the picture its sense of inevitability.
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Homer showed the painting in the spring of 1876 at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York, as number 194, under the title A Fair Wind. The New York press covered it widely, from the New York Times and the Tribune to The Nation and Appleton’s Journal.
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It was well received. One critic of the day, quoted by the National Gallery of Art, saw in the young helmsman an “American son, gazing brightly off to the illimitable horizon.” Yet the critics remained divided about Homer himself: that same spring the New York Times faulted his “admirable facility which tempts him to half do things,” while the Art Journal declared that “it is impossible to deny Mr. Homer’s genius.”
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Homer himself did not seem to regard the picture as his peak. When his patron Lawson Valentine considered buying it, the painter talked him out of it, promising to paint “much better pictures.” The work was shown in 1877 at the Kurtz Gallery in New York, ahead of an auction where, according to the press, it fetched one of the highest prices of the sale. In any case, by 1878 it belonged to the collector Charles Stewart Smith, whose family kept it until 1943.
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The date of 1876 invites a reading that goes beyond genre painting. The country was emerging from a war that had killed more than six hundred thousand people, and Reconstruction in the South was still under way.
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The National Gallery of Art sees in the picture a possible echo of a changing national mood after the Civil War, in a period it describes as idealistic. The fair wind, the safe sea, the relaxed crew, the fish in the bottom of the boat add up to an image of a confident future; and it is a child who holds the tiller.
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Homer, true to form, never said anything of the kind. Nothing requires us to see an allegory here, and that may be the picture’s strength: anyone can recognize in it a young, active America facing the open sea, without the painter ever needing to say so.
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Vingt-trois ans plus tard, Homer peindrait une autre petite embarcation seule sur la mer : The Gulf Stream<\/em>. Le contraste est saisissant. Ici, le bateau file sous un ciel clair, men\u00e9 par un enfant ; l\u00e0, la barque d\u00e9m\u00e2t\u00e9e d\u00e9rive au milieu des requins, et son unique passager semble attendre un sort qu’il ne ma\u00eetrise plus. <\/p>\n\n Entre les deux, il y a Cullercoats et Prouts Neck, la d\u00e9couverte d’une mer violente, et peut-\u00eatre le d\u00e9senchantement d’un homme vieillissant. Breezing Up<\/em> en prend d’autant plus de prix : c’est l’image d’un moment d’\u00e9quilibre, dans l’\u0153uvre de Homer comme dans l’histoire am\u00e9ricaine, o\u00f9 l’avenir semblait grand ouvert.<\/p>\n\n Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, on the National Mall, which received it on December 31, 1943, as a gift of the W. L. and May T. Mellon Foundation. It belongs to the American painting collection in the West Building. The canvas measures 24 3\/16 by 38 3\/16 inches (61.5 \u00d7 97 cm). The museum also owns The Flirt, the small 1874 version: a rare chance to find, in a single collection, both the starting point and the outcome of a composition, even if the two are not necessarily on view at the same time. Admission is free, and images of both paintings are available in open access on the National Gallery of Art’s website. The painting has made at least one trip to France. In 1965 it was lent to the Petit Palais in Paris for the exhibition Trois mill\u00e9naires d’art et de marine (Three Millennia of Art and the Sea): a brief Parisian stay for one of the most American images there is.
\n\nWhere to see the painting<\/h2>\n\n
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\n\nFurther Reading<\/h2>\n\n
Institutional Documentation<\/h4>\n\n