Welcome to the Addison Gallery of American Art.

I'm Tamara Vichai, host of the art history podcast, The Lonely Palette, and throughout this three-episode series, Your Guide to the Addison, as we celebrate its 90th anniversary by looking at some of the most important and provocative objects in the museum's collection.

Join me on a thematic stroll

through the galleries as we poke and probe both what these objects mean to art history

and to each other. Today, exploring the urban sublime.

Winslow Homer's Eight Bells from 1886 is a truly glorious painting.

It's a crown jewel in the Addison's collection, and for good reason.

It's a dynamic, detailed masterpiece brimming with man, sky, and sea, and considered truly a paradigm of its genre.

But what exactly is its genre? Is it a landscape, with so much of the canvas taken up by the spectrum of clouds and churning ocean waves? Is it a landscape, with so much of the canvas taken up by the spectrum of clouds and churning

ocean waves?

Is it a battle scene?

With the sailors in the foreground and their glistening wet hats feeling the first rays

of sun after a storm that they've resolutely survived?

The tempestuousness of nature is painted with all the tenderness and dimensions of a

portrait. The natural sunlight then acts as the painting's light source, breaking through the clouds

and both illuminating and giving volume to the scene's natural and man-made details. The white

caps of the waves, the men's instruments, their weathered oil skins,

the glints of moisture on the boat's hull. So what kind of genre is this? More than anything,

it feels like a painting about the equilibrium of all of its competing parts. You don't often see this

kind of detente between human beings and the natural world, between little us and big it.

It's a rare and ephemeral thing to witness a moment where man and nature feels so calmly

and evenly matched.

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