Salt Kettle, Bermuda

Winslow Homer

National Gallery of Art

We look across a coral-pink beach that curves around a royal-blue bay, under a glimmering, pale blue sky in this horizontal watercolor landscape. The area of the beach closest to us is cast under a pale, plum-purple shadow. The beach curves away from us and to the right, like a backward C. At the curve, a short distance from us, a bank of emerald-green vegetation and a scrubby, dark green tree leads back to a low, grassy hill. A pair of two-story buildings with oyster-white walls and bright white roofs perch on the spit of land opposite us, across the water. Pale pink boats are pulled up onto the beach in front of and to our left of the buildings. The buildings and the green hill reflect in the water, which laps against the sand closest to us with bands of azure blue. More loosely painted buildings line the horizon, which comes about a third of the way up the composition. Two brick-red smudges to our left could be people standing at the water’s edge in the distance. The sky above has puffy white clouds against a brilliant blue sky. The artist signed the painting in the lower left, “HOMER.” In the lower right, the location and date are written in dark gray, “Salt Kettle Dec 1899.”