MURA · THE COLLECTION · WINSLOW HOMER

Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)

Breezing Up (A Fair Wind) is an oil painting by Winslow Homer, worked on between 1873 and 1876, showing a small sailing boat with a man and three boys off Gloucester, Massachusetts. It measures 61.5 by 97 centimetres and belongs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, accession number 1943.13.1.

Winslow Homer · 1873–1876 · Oil on canvas · Impressionism · story written 25 September 2026

What you are looking at

A small boat leans into a fair wind, carrying an afternoon out to sea. Wikipedia identifies the vessel as a catboat named Gloucester, sailing through Gloucester harbour with a man, three boys and their catch aboard. The Commons record classes the picture as marine art.

How it was painted

Homer visited Gloucester in the summer of 1873 and made watercolour sketches there; he began the oil afterwards in New York. Wikipedia reports that infrared reflectography has revealed many changes made over the three years, including the removal of a fourth boy near the mast and of a second schooner in the distance, and the replacement of a boy in the bow with an anchor.

The painting was first shown at the National Academy of Design in 1876 and then at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. By 1879 it had come to be known as Breezing Up, a title that was not Homer's own but one he did not seem to object to. The gallery has described it as one of the best-known and most beloved images of life in nineteenth-century America.

Where it went

The gallery's provenance records that Charles Stewart Smith of New York owned the picture by 1878. His son believed it had been bought directly from the artist, but the gallery notes it may instead have been sold at auction in New York on 1 or 2 March 1877, after an exhibition at the Kurtz Gallery, where the New York Herald reported it fetched one of the highest prices of the sale. It passed by inheritance to Howard Caswell Smith of Oyster Bay, New York, was sold in 1943 to Wildenstein & Co., and was bought by the gallery on 31 December 1943. The credit line is "Gift of the W. L. and May T. Mellon Foundation". The reproduction is the Google Art Project file on Wikimedia Commons.

Why it is in Mura

It belongs to the Coast & Countryside collection with a luminous mood: open water and a following wind, the plainest of American summer pictures.