The Flow Will Return: Geological Time in Winslow Homer’s Work

Abstract

While art historians have examined geology’s enormous presence in American painting of the nineteenth century, few have considered how the work of Winslow Homer registered this popular science and its pull on the public’s imagination. This article seeks to correct that oversight and argues that Homer addressed geology and was receptive to the science’s revelations concerning time and the earth’s age. Calling attention to rock formations and signs of time’s erosive force across a large body of his work, the article revisits paintings such as the 1869 Long Branch, New Jersey, where it locates allusions to eastern coastal subsidence, in order to demonstrate how time informed and structured some of the artist’s most familiar images. It proposes that Homer’s late marine paintings of waves thrashing rock, in particular, are consumed by the thought of geological time and the ways it dwarfs human time.