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After initially making his reputation with paintings on themes related to the Civil War, in the late 1860s and through the 1870s Winslow Homer turned instead to painting people relaxing and at play: children, young women, genre paintings of farm and sea scenes. In 1881–82 he spent time in Cullercoats, in northeast England, where he painted the local fisherman and women. On his return to the US, he settled for good in Prout's Neck, Maine, where his father and brother had recently purchased a large amount of land. His brother had spent his honeymoon in Prout's Neck in 1875, and Winslow had visited him then. In both these locations he returned to painting the sea with more serious themes, such as the hard and dangerous lives of the fishermen and their families, and "humankind’s life-and-death struggles against the sea and the elemental power of nature."He had a studio built for him in Prout's Neck, which was completed in 1884. Here he painted The Fog Warning, one of three paintings he completed there in 1885 depicting the lives of the local fishermen. These are considered among his best works representing the subject; the others are Lost on the Grand Banks, and The Herring Net. Many of his late paintings, like The Fog Warning, depict a single figure at sea. Another theme in many of his paintings of the fisherman's life was the bounty of the sea, which also provides the people's livelihood; the two are combined in this painting, which was originally exhibited under the title Halibut Fishing.
Halibut Maine genre painting Cullercoats Winslow Homer Lost on the Grand Banks Civil War Prout's Neck, Maine England