Religious Salvation and Winslow Homer's 'Shipwreck'

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Winslow Homer
The Life Line, 1884
Oil on canvas, 28 5/8 x 44 3/4 inches (72.7 x 113.7 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The George W. Elkins Collection, 1924

Posted: 10/13/2012 9:04 am
Menachem Wecker
Religious art blogger, Houston Chronicle

Prints of American painter Winslow Homer's seascapes, children at rest and play, and hunting scenes are almost as frequent fixtures on the walls of bedrooms and college dorms as are Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World.

But just as there are more serious themes (such as suicide) embedded in Robert Frost's seemingly innocuous and tranquil poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1922), for example, there is more at play in Homer's deceptively calming watercolor and oil works.

As the exhibit Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and The Life Line, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, suggests, the artist's faith may surface in some of the maritime metaphors in his work, particularly the notion of being "saved."

"Although Homer was notoriously private about his personal life, his letters reveal a hybrid of Protestant faith and secular rationalism shared in this era by New Englanders of his class and education," noted Kristina Garcia Wade, a press officer at the Philadelphia Museum, in an email. "In addition, there was a popular correlation between being 'saved' from shipwreck and being 'saved' spiritually."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/menachem-wecker/religious-salvation-and-winslow-homers-shipwreck_b_1946538.html

Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and The Life Line
Sept. 22 - Dec. 16, 2012
Philadelphia Museum of Art

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1. Art Historian Marilyn Stockstad

has noted that the face of the rescuer is deliberately obscured by the blowing scarf so that the viewer's focus is on the real "hero," the newly invented life line mechanism. He makes sure the eye is drawn first to it by setting it against the purest white in the painting. I believe the huffingtonpost article overstates the metaphor a bit.