After the Hurricane

Tornado killer is one of the best watercolor works of the American artist Winslove Homer (1836 - 1910) on the marine theme.

Homer belongs to the famous masters of watercolor painting in the United States. His achievements in watercolor surpass his works in lithography and are almost in no way inferior to his painting. Moreover, in watercolor works the immediacy and ease of sketching are preserved, some incompleteness, which so impresses modern viewers and connoisseurs of art.

In the English and American art tradition, watercolor was used for calm, almost idyllic landscapes. Homer did the same - with the image of autumn, children, young girls. The more unexpected it was to turn in watercolor to tragic events.

The real tragedy taken from reality is present in the watercolor "Tornado killer (After a tornado)". The harsh sea has just calmed down. But a terrible event has already happened. Waves washed up on the coast the wreckage of a fishing boat and the corpse of a Negro fisherman. Everything is simple and frightening, no concessions to noble prejudices about an ugly topic, the impossibility of such a work to hang in the living room or office of a wealthy home.

The corpse is not news in art. They were gladly painted by masters of English and French romanticism - (Theodore Géricault, Fusley, etc.) it is not about the image, but in the load of idea, in the destructive or humanistic vector of the artist's aspirations. Géricault — to scare the viewer and demonstrate his courage — painted a still life with a dismembered human body (a museum in Montpellier). This does not really need to be hung in the living room.

The watercolor "Tornado Killer" by Homer is one of a number of majestic tragedies of humanistic orientation. The artist acutely feels someone else's misfortune and warns his own work against danger. After all, weak and careless have no place at sea. It was bad that the circle of dangerous works in the time of Homer expanded, and the sensitive master felt it and made it a theme of his work. In watercolor bitterness from dangerous work associated with the sea, dangerous professions in general reflected the most. This surpassed the plots of other dramatic in the plots of homer's paintings.