In Winslow Homer’s “Life-Size Black Bass,” a fish is in the throes of getting hooked on a Florida river; the painting shows the olive-like eye of the bass and flashes of red from the underside of its gills, and more red from the angler’s fuzzy red fishing fly. It’s an action scene set against blue-gray water, palm trees, and a bird of prey circling above. The picture is made of water and depicts water, and the viewer can almost feel the surrounding humidity of the jungle, too. As the fish writhes in its last moments, the painting, made in 1904, is heavy on many levels. It is also a thrilling example of Homer’s mastery of the medium of watercolor.
The artist’s many watercolors depicting Florida’s lush, powerful, and, at times, dangerous natural beauty are good candidates for the most iconic artworks ever made that depict the Sunshine State. The verdant scenes—spiky palm fronds, stalking panthers, and dazzling blue reflections—are “quintessential images of Florida,” says Ariella Wolens, a curator at NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale.
Homer (1836–1910), long considered among the very best American artists, was a Yankee, born and raised in and around Boston, who lived in New York for years and later spent much of his life in Maine. He began as an illustrator, documenting the Civil War in drawings for Harper’s Weekly, and then rose to a career as an acclaimed painter.
“Life-Size Black Bass”, 1904
A quirky, independent character, Homer never married and had no children. He followed his own muse, pursuing work and leisure as he wanted, and often combining the two. Although a realist, figurative painter like his contemporary Thomas Eakins and the slightly younger John Singer Sargent—two of the other most acclaimed American artists in the second half of the 19th century—Homer always imbued his work with a heavy side of symbolism. His pictures work perfectly on the surface, but they can also be read on a deeper level. His journeys southward later in life—to the Bahamas, other points in the Caribbean, and to Florida—produced some of his most important pictures.
“The Gulf Stream,” for instance, painted in 1899 and then reworked later, depicts a Black man adrift in a wrecked fishing boat surrounded by sharks and set against a stormy sky, probably in the Caribbean—a classic representation of Homer’s fatalist side. In his works, Mother Nature is in charge.
Homer loved the water, and any number of oils and watercolors depicted the ocean, lakes, rivers, and streams. Often, he painted waves crashing against the rocks of his beloved adopted home of Prouts Neck, Maine. In Florida, his love of nature perfectly dovetailed with his love of sport.
“The main thing to keep in mind about Winslow Homer and Florida is that Winslow Homer was a passionate angler, and when Homer went to Florida, it wasn’t to lie on the beach, and it wasn’t to chase alligators, it was to go fishing,” says William Cross, the author of Winslow Homer: American Passage. The Winslow Homer Archival Collection at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art even contains his beloved fishing net.
Fishing pictures recur throughout the artist’s career, frequently depicting the Adirondacks. Around age 50, he started frequently traveling to Florida. In fact, as Cross recounts in his book, he spent his 50th birthday in Jacksonville on a trip with his father in 1886. It’s worth noting that, at the time, the state was largely a nature preserve. By 1900, Florida’s entire population was still only around a half-million people.
“Palm Trees, Florida,” 1904, by Winslow Homer © 2026 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Though he spent some time in Key West, it was further north where he concentrated his travels, in two spots in particular: the town of Homosassa, on the Homosassa River feeding immediately into the Gulf of Mexico, where “Life-Size Black Bass” was first seen and sketched; and due east of that, on Lake Monroe, just north of Orlando. On one of his stays in Homosassa, he wrote in a letter that it had a “delightful climate” and that the fishing there was “the best in America.”
According to Cross, Homer would frequently sketch his fishing scenes on site, and then make a full watercolor later, either at his lodgings—he loved the Brock House hotel near Lake Monroe, a famed wooden hotel that was razed in 1937— or in his studio. On some trips he had a camera with him, too.
The Museum of Fine Arts Boston has the largest trove of Homer’s watercolors, and a recent show, Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor, featured two representative Florida scenes: “Palm Trees, Florida” (1904) and “Thornhill Bar (Florida)” (1886).
“Watercolor was all about observation for him,” says Christina Michelon, an MFA curator who co-curated the show. “It was about capturing the most ephemeral qualities of an environment. It was a tool for looking.”
This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol. 11. To read the full story, click here to purchase the issue.
