NARRATOR: The waters of the Caribbean are choppy and dangerous, setting the stage for one of Winslow Homer’s most complicated and consequential paintings, The Gulf Stream.

Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, Daniel Immerwahr:

DANIEL IMMERWAHR: The title refers to the Gulf Stream, which you can think of as a river within the ocean, carrying the waters of the Caribbean up the East Coast of the United States and then across the Atlantic over to Europe. That's a geography that connects the Caribbean to the United States to Europe, blending all of the spaces where Homer had painted into one single space.

NARRATOR: With the Gulf Stream as a channel uniting multiple waters, it also works as a powerful metaphor for Homer in this painting, as he brings together a variety of themes.

DANIEL IMMERWAHR: There's something that's really interesting about the subject of the painting, which is this ambiguous man who is adrift in choppy waters with a storm headed his way. Is he confident? Is he afraid? It's hard to tell.

NARRATOR: At this moment, the United States is expanding its empire and there’s political turmoil in the Caribbean. Homer alludes to those issues by creating an epic saga with a Black protagonist. Facing extreme conditions aboard his distressed vessel, he appears stoic and resolved.

DANIEL IMMERWAHR: The central figure is looking at something. But what's he looking at? We don’t know. The poet, Derek Walcott, had an idea of where this figure was looking. He was looking toward Africa. This is how he writes: “Circled by his chain-sawing sharks, the ropes in his neck turned his head toward Africa and the Gulf Stream, which left him there forever between our island and the coast of Guinea, fixed in the tribal dream, in the light that entered another Homer’s hand, its breeze lifting the canvas from the museum.”