About this work
The eye goes immediately to the figures. *Market Scene, Nassau* belongs to a group of at least six watercolors Homer completed in 1885 depicting everyday scenes featuring local market women on the coral streets of Nassau, the Bahamian capital. Against the bleached brightness of a tropical street, women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads move with an easy, practiced authority — figures Homer rendered with a journalist's precision and a painter's warmth. Homer observed his subjects with a reporter's eye, capturing erect postures and details of dress — a calico bandanna, a load carried with effortless balance. The palette is the palette of Nassau itself: ivory coral underfoot, deep cerulean sky, the warm ochres and earth tones of cloth and skin catching the midday light. Light washes of color allow the texture of the paper to show through, and in some places the paper is left untouched entirely, so that its whiteness — not paint — creates the highlights of brilliant tropical sunlight.
In December 1884, Homer and his father set off for Nassau by steamship from New York. Over a two-month period, the artist painted prolifically in watercolor, characteristically distancing himself from tourists and popular sites — as he had done in Cullercoats — seeking out the local population and preferring to depict truthful scenes of daily life.
Already a master of the medium when he first arrived, Homer broke new ground as he adapted his techniques to the peculiar flattening effect of dazzling tropical light.
Nassau offered Homer new conditions of color and light, but his emphasis on local life was consistent with his broader approach — by the mid-1870s, his art had become preoccupied with a search for authentic experience through the portrayal of ordinary people in their native settings and at work.
The watercolors he painted in the tropics represent a technical high point in his work in the medium.
On the wall, *Market Scene, Nassau* radiates without shouting. In contrast to Homer's usual subjects — the New England countryside and the coasts of Maine and northern England — this tropical setting offered a unique brilliance of sunlight, sea, and sky, and strong contrasts of bright color in foliage and the costumes of the inhabitants. It belongs in rooms where natural light comes and changes through the day: a dining room, an entryway, a sunlit study. The viewer it calls to is one drawn to dignity in the everyday — not spectacle, but the unhurried gravity of real people going about real work, caught by an artist who knew that the truest subjects were usually the ones everyone else walked past.
