Breezing Up, 1876 by Winslow Homer Breezing Up was the capstone
of Homer's Gloucester paintings, his most popular painting since
Prisoners from the Front, and so compellingly attractive that
his critics, as they were seldom at this time willing to do,
forgave the coarseness and abbreviation of style that, even
here, they could not entirely pass by without comment. The
finished work indicates that the significant influence of
Japanese art on Western painters in the 19th century also
touched Homer, particularly in the compositional balance between
the left (active) and right (sparse) halves. Homer had visited
France in 1866 and 1867, and the influence of marine scenes by
the French painters Gustave Courbet and Claude Monet is apparent
as well. Today, Breezing Up is considered an iconic American
painting, and among Homer's finest. The National Gallery of Art
purchased the work in 1943, described by the institution's web
site as "one of the best-known and most beloved artistic images
of life in nineteenth-century