Pyeongye
A small boat tips on the waves. Two fishermen lean over the side, hauling in a net, and silver fish hang from it, glinting. Anyone would look at those fish first. But now look at the far edges of the picture, where the sea meets the fog. Something is out there.
The American painter Winslow Homer made The Herring Net in 1885. In 1881 he spent time in a fishing community in Tynemouth, England, and the experience changed his work. Afterward he painted almost nothing but people struggling with nature, especially the sea. He painted this picture at Prouts Neck, on the coast of Maine.
Start with the net.
The herring hang in rows, their heads stuck through the mesh. Small touches of red mark the gills. Their backs are blue and their bellies white, and a few quick strokes make the wet scales shine. A net like this is a gillnet. Fish swim into it and get caught by their gills.
In the boat, one man pulls the net in while the other unloads the catch. The Art Institute of Chicago suggests that the second figure might be a boy. Both wear wide-brimmed hats pulled low, so we barely see their faces.
Now go to the horizon on the far left.
A gray sail rises faintly out of the fog. The tip of a mast reaches thinly into the sky. The outline is soft, and the color is almost the same as the sky. This is a ship far larger than the little boat.
Look at the far right as well.
This is even fainter. A few triangles, just a little darker than the sky, overlap. The museum identifies these shapes as schooners on the horizon. A schooner is a sailing ship with two or more masts.
As the museum puts it, the two men are working far from those schooners. If the fog grew just a bit thicker, the ships would seem to vanish from the picture entirely.
That same year, Homer painted The Fog Warning. There too, a fisherman in a small boat looks back toward a distant ship. At sea, fog was a real danger. It could leave a small boat unable to find its way back.
Look at the net again, and it feels different. A full net is a good catch. But the more fish come aboard, the heavier the little boat gets. The museum describes the pair working to steady the unstable boat as it rides the incoming swells. In front of the boat, a red keg floats on the water.
