Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 61.5 x 97 cm (24 3/16 x 38 3/16 inches)
- Year
- 1873 ... 1876
- Availability
- In a museum collection, not for sale
- Collection
- National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Accession Number
- 1943.13.1
- Credit Line
- Gift of the W. L. and May T. Mellon Foundation
- Copyright
- Public domain
Description
A catboat called the Gloucester cuts across the harbor with a man and three boys aboard and their catch in the bottom of the boat. Homer first called it A Fair Wind. It is one of the best known American pictures of ordinary nineteenth century life, and it took him three years to settle.
How It Was Made, and What Changed
Homer began the canvas in New York in 1873, working from sketches he had made at Gloucester, Massachusetts. He kept changing it until 1876. Infrared scans done at the National Gallery of Art show a fourth boy near the mast that he painted out and a second schooner in the distance that he removed. The painting was bought straight from the artist by the New York collector Charles Stewart Smith, stayed in that family until 1943, then went to the Gallery the same year.