Moonlight, Wood Island Light - Winslow Homer (1894)

Wood Island Light Winslow

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Moonlight, Wood Island Light is an oil painting on canvas by American artist Winslow Homer, depicting a nocturnal seascape viewed from near his studio at Prouts Neck, Maine. The composition is dominated by a deep, unified darkness across sky and water, with moonlight casting a vertical reflection along the left of the canvas and a tiny spot of red pigment on the horizon marking the lighthouse on Wood Island, to the south of Prouts Neck. Homer (1836–1910), widely regarded as one of the foremost painters of nineteenth-century America, spent the last decades of his life at Prouts Neck where the sea became his defining subject, rendered with vigorous brushwork and closely observed realism. Painted in 1894 and gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1911, the work exemplifies Homer's mature engagement with pure seascape—devoid of human figures—and his ability to convey atmosphere and mood through a restrained tonal palette.