Welcome to the Addison Gallery of American Art. I'm Tamara Vichai, host of the

art history podcast The Lonely Pallet and throughout this three episodes 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 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.

...