From a Wall Street Journal article:
That’s how I felt while visiting “Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869-1880,” an intimate exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum. The show is handsome, historically rich and perfectly positioned here at this harbor venue, which devotes galleries to regional maritime and fishing artifacts, local decorative arts, Gloucester sea captain Elias Davis ’s house and the works of the renowned illustrator and marine painter Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865), a Gloucester native with whom Boston-born Winslow Homer (1836-1910) had much in common.
An illustrator and painter, Homer is chiefly celebrated for his mature paintings of life on or near the sea. “Homer on the Beach” was never intended to be a gathering of Homer’s greatest maritime works. Therefore, it does not contain those revered later masterpieces such as “The Life Line” (1884), “The Herring Net” (1885) and “The Gale” (1883-93), but it lays their foundations and illumines the first leg of his voyage. Curated by William R. Cross, a museum consultant and chairman of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, the show focuses on Homer’s artistic formation as a marine painter.
To read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/homer-at-the-beach-a-marine-painters-journey-1869-1880-review-flotsam-jetsam-handsome-11567249200