3-016-739 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Daughter of the Coast Guard, 1881. Homer travelled to England in 1881 and settled in the village of Cullercoats near Tynemouth on the craggy North Sea coast. This remote place, nestled on a hill by a small bay, was inhabited by a small community of fisherfolk, whose customs and hazardous lives Homer observed and depicted in his works. The subject is one of these fishergirls whom Homer sets against the stormy waters and misty sky of the North Sea. The scene appears to capture the girl’s exhaustion after hours of fruitlessly searching with her voice horn for survivors of some shipwreck or a boat lost in the fog.