From his Southern trips came the material for “The Gulf Stream” done about 1886. Once more the painter has grasped the psychological moment. A shipwrecked, starving negro is lying on the deck of a dismasted schooner drifting in the Gulf Stream. In the shadowed water of the foreground sharks are playing, beyond the boat are whitecaps and running seas, in the distance is the suggestion of a waterspout under a blue-gray sky. There is quite a display of color. It is in the sea and sky, but its breadth is somewhat disturbed by being flecked with white in patches. The picture is spotty in the foam and the clouds, and does not sum up as a complete harmony. It seems as though color were not an integral part of it but something brought in as an afterthought--color added to design rather than design in color. [Illustration: “Marine,” by Winslow Homer. In the Emerson McMillin Collection.] This is not the case, however, with the very beautiful “Herring Net,” done at about the same time. It is another open-sea piece with fishermen drawing into a boat a net full of wriggling fish caught in the meshes. Herring, as they come out of the water, are brilliant in iridescent hues, and no doubt that in itself appealed to Homer and was the reason for the picture’s existence. The color at once became the illustrative motive--became the picture. There is no feeling now of color as an afterthought or as playing second part to the men or the sea. The eye goes to the glittering herring at once. You comprehend at a glance that this is a color scheme _per se_, and that the gray men and the gray sea are only a ground upon which the iridescent hues appear. Whether Homer realized how beautiful the color was, whether he had any emotional feeling about it, or saw any fine pictorial poetry in it, who shall say? In life he was disposed to deny such things. He said to John W. Beatty: “When I have selected a thing carefully, I paint it exactly as it appears.” Was that his procedure with the “Herring Net”? Was it merely a color report of what he had seen? If so, he never saw anything so beautiful again. It is his high-water mark as a colorist. Homer was now producing his best-known pictures of fishermen, sailors, and sea, such as the “Fog Warning” and “Eight Bells.” A literary half-illustrative quality marks them, but perhaps we should not feel this did we not know the painter had served time at that side of art. They can stand as great pictures all by themselves, simply because they are powerful characterizations of the sea. They have a driving truth about them that sweeps away any demurrer on account of their method. And in them all there is indication and suggestion of an expanding pictorial sense. It came late, for Homer was fifty. It was never to become a complete expansion, it was always more of a suggestion than a realization; but it was a welcome addition and showed the painter’s active and receptive mind.