In 1885, while based in the Bahamas, Winslow Homer set an entire world on paper: the precise fall of Caribbean light in midday on a coral stone road peopled by a local woman on the way to the market. In this watercolor, Homer paints her carrying two brightly plumed bantam roosters. The sheet documents his first trip to the Bahamas, in 1884-85, when he registered—with a journalist’s eye—his model’s erect posture and her calico bandanna.
“I think the Bahamas is the best place I have ever found,” Homer later reflected. To escape the harsh Maine winters of his home in Prout’s Neck, Winslow Homer sought the warm shores of Florida and the Caribbean. In a series of illustrations for Century Magazine, he vividly captured Bermuda’s lively capital Nassau, then a burgeoning tourist resort that flourished in the trade of sponges, oranges, bananas, lemons, sugar apples, and tamarinds.
Homer followed closely in the footsteps of other Impressionist aficionados of Caribbean scenery like Camille Jacob Pissarro, Claude Monet and Francisco Oller. Together these artists will bring the Caribbean basin to Brooklyn this fall in Impressionism and the Caribbean: Francisco Oller and His Transatlantic World, a long overdue celebration of the region and period as a thriving seat of artistic exchange.
