Winslow Homer’s The Lookout – ‘All’s Well’: Time, Order, and the Night Sky in a Later Nineteenth Century Painting

Abstract

Winslow Homer’s 1896 painting The Lookout – ‘All’s Well’ features a night sky with three prominent stars. As an unusual image for the artist, the painting raises interesting questions about appearance and meaning in the depiction of the starry sky. It reflects the artist’s relationship to and knowledge of other painters of the night sky in the nineteenth-century in form and iconography. This paper suggests that Homer combined close observation with a partly fictive rendering of the sky to express his interest in orderliness and a personal sense of place in the cosmos.