Shipwreck! was written by Kathleen A. Foster and published by Philadelphia Museum of Art to coincide with an exhibition at the Museum in 2012. Winslow Homer’s painting, The Life Line – even on a book cover – captures the emotional drama and peril of a shipwreck rescue in the 1880s. The Life Line was acclaimed as a masterpiece during the artist’s lifetime and is a magnificent, unforgettable painting.  

Foster’s book provides a thorough biography of Winslow Homer’s art, and also touches on his life as a single man and devoted son. Describing him as “America’s greatest marine painter” Foster explains the range of historical and creative influences on his work: living on the Atlantic coast in the second half of the nineteenth century while trans-Atlantic shipping and immigration flourished; a growing interest in seascapes and shipwrecks among his contemporaries and earlier influential artists (like JMW Turner); and real shipwrecks, such as the wreck of the Atlantic off Nova Scotia in 1873 and gallant rescues. Foster also explains the new technology (in Homer’s time) which gave The Life Line its name – the “breeches buoy” – a buoy suspended from a rope cast from the shore to the wreck.

Shipwreck! is incisive, really interesting art-history reading and a very well-crafted narrative of a man who was able to create a “brilliantly managed staging of a public, physical embrace, expertly tailored to the delicate Victorian sensibilities of the 1880s”.  Shipwreck! will make you want to head to Philadelphia to see Homer’s original.