Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)

[1] Infrared reflectography has revealed the many changes he made to the composition during this time, including the removal of a fourth boy near the mast and a second schooner in the distance.

The finished work indicates that the significant influence of Japanese art on Western painters in the 19th century also touched Homer, particularly in the compositional balance between the left (active) and right (sparse) halves.

Homer had visited France in 1866 and 1867, and the influence of marine scenes by the French painters Gustave Courbet and Claude Monet is apparent as well.

"[4] Another wrote, "Much has already been said in praise of the easy, elastic motion of the figures of the party in the sailboat, which is scudding along through blue water under 'a fair wind.'

[6] The National Gallery of Art purchased the work in 1943, described by the institution's web site as "one of the best-known and most beloved artistic images of life in nineteenth-century America.

The Gulf Stream , Winslow Homer, 1899. Breezing Up has been called "the one painting among all of Homer's earlier works positioned most squarely in the lineage of The Gulf Stream "; the sense of hope in Breezing Up is replaced by apparent pessimism in the later work. [ 3 ]