A Light on the Sea

Throughout his long career, Winslow Homer made pictures that featured women, curious light effects, or, most famously, especially as he grew older, the Atlantic Ocean. On occasion he combined these interests. In the last of his works to show all three motifs, _A Light on the Sea_, Homer created one of his most enigmatic paintings.

Homer presents an apparently simple scene. A woman walks along a rocky shoreline, a fishing net with buoys slung over her shoulder. Light gleams on the water behind her while a gull glides in the air above to the right. Details can be identified. The site is demonstrably Prout's Neck, Maine, where Homer had made his home since 1884, looking southward across Saco Bay; the rocks are ones he often fished from. The model was a local woman named Ida Meserve Harding, who had earlier posed for him. Yet such factual details do little to elucidate the picture.

There is a mystery. Something has caught the woman's attention, causing her to stop midstride and look back over her shoulder – perhaps a sound raised by whatever has caused the gull to rise from its roost and soar away. Suggesting that the viewer, too, follow her glance, Homer makes the picture's narrative focus on a point just beyond the right edge of the scene.

There is another source of disquiet in the work. What is the weather? What is the time of day? Some early writers thought the picture showed a "cold but keen white wintery sunlight." For others, it was "a beautiful picture of the sea at night." Viewers today are no less divided. Homer often declared that he was true to his observations: "When I have selected the thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears." Yet diametrically opposed readings of Homer's paintings over the years reveal the elusiveness of his truths, a seemingly intended ambiguity that has kept them vital and brings to the fore the viewer's share of a painting's meaning.