Breaking Storm, Coast of Maine

Winslow Homer

Transparent watercolor, with touches of opaque watercolor, rewetting, blotting, and traces of scraping, on thick, rough-textured, ivory wove paper

Art Institute of Chicago

Breaking Storm, Coast of Maine is a watercolor executed by Winslow Homer at Prouts Neck, the rugged Maine peninsula where he lived and worked from 1883 until his death in 1910. The composition depicts a tranquil turquoise sea rendered in pure, transparent washes, set against an approaching storm visible on the horizon, while the rocky foreground shore is handled with loose, near-abstract brushwork that foregrounds the sheer expressive quality of the medium. Homer, one of the foremost American painters of the nineteenth century, used technically sophisticated watercolor methods—including rewetting, blotting, and selective scraping—to capture the fleeting atmospheric conditions of the Maine coast with directness and precision. The work belongs to his celebrated mature series of coastal seascapes, in which he increasingly focused on the elemental force and beauty of the sea itself, stripped of narrative incident and human figures.