The black sailor lies back on his broken, doomed craft. All around him, the sea chomps and shudders. And there is a storm coming, to judge from the spinning column of grey water on the horizon. A ship is ploughing through these troubled waters but will it care enough to help? The sharks seem to know it won’t. They expect a meal any moment now. They roll and glide by the boat, flashing their giant mouths and tiny eyes.
This is Winslow Homer’s 1899 masterpiece The Gulf Stream, and there could not be a more timely loan to the National Gallery from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as the US is consumed by its history of racial injustice and premonitions of disaster, even of a second civil war. Is America doomed, like this sailor? Is it a wreck about to be torn apart by its own divisions, savaged by the circling shark of a second Trump candidacy? Homer hasn’t any answers but he poses the question of how a nation with such a legacy of slavery can ever escape its past.
