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A woman holding a baby stands near a young boy who perches in the tipped-up end of a rowboat that has been pulled onto a sandy beach in this horizontal painting. All the people have light skin. The turquoise and aquamarine-blue ocean beyond meets the pale blue sky at the horizon line, about halfway up the composition. To our left of center, one end of the wooden rowboat has been propped on what might be a fallen piling on the sandy, rocky beach. The boy sitting in the bow faces our left almost in profile, and wears a round, brimmed straw hat over brown hair, a brown, long-sleeved shirt, and charcoal-gray pants. His face turns away from us so we only see his cheek and the curve of his ear. To our right, the woman’s dark hair is pulled up and she wears a white apron over a long brown skirt. She stands angled to our right and looks over the shoulder of the blond baby she holds up against her chest. The child is dressed in a white skirt, blue sash, a red jacket, and black shoes. The beach around the people is strewn with another rowboat, large boulders, a wooden barrel, and fishing nets hung over a tall frame to dry. A few tufts of scrubby grass grow in the sand around the woman’s feet. The white sails of several ships line the horizon in the deep distance. Thin, pale peach clouds float across an ice-blue sky. The artist signed and dated the work in dark paint in the lower left corner: “WINSLOW HOMER 1873.”

Winslow Homer

Dad's Coming!, 1873

West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 68

Medium

oil on wood

Dimensions

overall: 22.9 x 34.9 cm (9 x 13 3/4 in.)

framed: 31.4 x 43.2 x 5.1 cm (12 3/8 x 17 x 2 in.)

Credit Line

Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon

Accession Number

2001.97.1

Artists / Makers

Winslow Homer (painter) American, 1836 - 1910

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Inscription

lower left: WINSLOW HOMER / 1873

Provenance

Joseph Harper, Jr., New York, in at least 1874;[1] to his son, William Harper, New York; to his son, John Harper; by inheritance to his wife, Olive E. Harper [later Mrs. Grismer], Hollywood, California; (Pierre F. Nesi, Beverly Hills), in 1946;[2] (Wildenstein & Co., New York), by at least 1948;[3] purchased January 1954 by Paul Mellon [1907-1999], Upperville, Virginia; bequest 1999 to NGA, with life interest to Mrs. Mellon; life interest released 2001.

[1] Harper lent the painting to the National Academy of Design annual exhibition in 1874.

[2] The descent in the Harper family, and the Beverly Hills dealer are included in the provenance for the painting in Lloyd Goodrich, edited and expanded by Abigail Booth Gerdts, Record of Works by Winslow Homer, New York, 2005: 2:no. 476.

[3] Wildenstein & Co. lent the painting to a 1948 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.

Associated Names

Mellon, Paul
Mellon, Rachel Lambert, Estate of

Exhibition History

1874: Forty-Ninth Annual Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, 1874, no. 358.

1948: The Coast and the Sea: A Survey of American Marine Painting, Brooklyn Museum, 1948-1949, no. 58, repro., as Waiting for Dad.

1951: Master Painters, Des Moines Art Center, September-October 1951, no. 21, repro.

1951: Winslow Homer: Illustrator, 1860-1875, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, February 1951, no. 23, as Waiting for Dad.

1952: Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings by Winslow Homer, 1836-1910, Allied Arts Association, Houston, 1952.

1958: Winslow Homer: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1958-1959, no. 28, as Waiting for Dad.

1964: Homer and the Sea: A Loan Exhibition of Marine Paintings of Winslow Homer, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Mariners Museum, Newport News, 1964, no. 7.

1968: American Art from Alumni Collections, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1968, no. 104, repro., as Waiting for Dad.

1973: Winslow Homer, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago, 1973, no. 22, repro.

1980: American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980, unnumbered catalogue, fig. 177.

1986: Loan to display with permament collection in conjunction with an exhibition of Winslow Homer watercolors, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986.

1991: Art for the Nation: Gifts in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1991, unnumbered catalogue, repro.

2005: Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2005-2006, unnumbered brochure.

2012: Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and "The Life Line", Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2012.

Bibliography

1873: "Dad's Coming" (an engraving of the painting), Harper's Weekly (1 November 1873).

1932: Bolton, John. "The Art of Winslow Homer: an estimate in 1932." Fine Arts (February 1932): 53.

1959: Goodrich, Lloyd. Winslow Homer. New York, 1959: repro.

1961: Gardner, Albert Ten Eyck. Winslow Homer, American Artist: His World and His Work. New York, 1961: repro., as Waiting for Dad.

1969: Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. 2nd ed. New York, 1979: 178, fig. 10-15. (3rd ed. Oxford, 2007: 150, plate 12.

1986: Wilmerding, John. "Winslow Homer's Dad's Coming." In Essays in Honor of Paul Mellon, Collector and Benefactor. Washington, D.C., 1986: 389-401, color repro. and fig. 1.

2001: Conrads, Margaret C. Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s. Exh. cat. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Los Angeles Museum of Art; High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Princeton, 2001: 54-62, 221 n. 43, fig. 45.

2005: Goodrich, Lloyd, and Abigail Booth Gerdts. Record of Works by Winslow Homer, vol. 2. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2005, no. 476.

2012: Foster, Kathleen A. "Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and 'The Life Line'." American Art Review 24, no. 6 (November-December 2012): 87, color repro.