The art of the famously reticent New England painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910) has often been studied through the lens of American history and criticism. Famed for his thunderous seascapes and brusque, unvarnished realism, Homer was identified by John Updike as “painting’s Melville,” while the artist’s wide-open landscapes and oceanic spaces have been likened to the compositions of American Abstract-Expressionists. “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents,” a compelling exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized by the Met’s Stephanie Herdrich and Sylvia Yount with Christopher Riopelle of the National Gallery, London, examines almost 90 of the artist’s works within current political and social contexts.

Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents

The Met Fifth Avenue, through July 31

Inspired by the Met’s seminal canvas of “The Gulf Stream” (1899, reworked by 1906)—which, in the show’s ingenious design, can be espied at the outset and studied up close in a later gallery—and centered on the remorseless theme of conflict in his art, the exhibition boldly reconfigures our understanding of Homer’s timeless American relevance. In this splendid show, where Homer’s artistic gifts are on stunning display, the largely self-trained, quintessential realist painter emerges not as a fully fledged modern, but as an unfailing witness to issues that shaped the nation’s history and image of itself in his era, and which still resonate today.

'Sharpshooter' (1863)

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Homer’s Civil War scenes reflect his early career as an artist-reporter for Harper’s Weekly, and turn an unsparing eye on the war’s blunt truths and brute ferocity. His “Sharpshooter” of 1863, an eerily elegant image of impending violence, depicts a marksman taking aim at unsuspecting human prey. The artist offers little in the way of judgment, but his coolly calculated image speaks volumes.

Further on, “A Visit From the Old Mistress” reflects the complicated racial legacy of the war and its aftermath. In it, a handsomely dressed older white woman stands at right before a frieze-like line of impoverished former slaves, their figures and expressions nearly illegible in their cramped, dimly lighted quarters. Painted in 1876, just months before the short-lived Reconstruction period came to a close, the profoundly disquieting image captures the era’s lingering cultural divide.

'Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)' (1873-76)

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Homer’s idyllic 1870s paintings of children, vacationers and Northerners in the open air would be touted by critics as nostalgic expressions of national values reasserted in the postwar years. His “Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)” of 1873-76, painted during a visit to Gloucester, Mass., depicts a man and three boys chopping through waves in open waters. The canvas, employing broad, open strokes to capture the wind and ocean swells and sharp touches of paint for its salty spray, would become iconic.

From 1881 to 1982 Homer lived in Cullercoats, a fishing village and art colony on Britain’s North Sea coast near Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. In such detailed, densely executed watercolors as “The Wreck of the Iron Crown” (1881), he honed his skills as a narrative painter of maritime catastrophes, while in the almost abstract oil sketch of “The Life Brigade” (c. 1882) broad strokes of pigment frame the subject’s local heroes against empty sands and roiling seas. Homer’s Cullercoats experience would inspire such darkly theatrical works as “The Life Line” (1884), a thrilling ocean rescue scene, and “The Fog Warning” (1885), a nightmarish painting of a lone fisherman in enveloping fog that Homer painted in his new home in Prout’s Neck, Maine.

'A Garden in Nassau' (1885)

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

On the show’s selective path through the artist’s career, a sizable collection of exquisite watercolors from Florida, Bermuda and the Caribbean reveals his blazing new palette, loosened brushwork, and growing fascination with those warmer Atlantic climes, where, in the 1880s and ’90s, Homer escaped the cold New England winters. Although it seems a stretch to read these radiant, tropical works as reflections of America’s imperial ambitions (as suggested in the catalog), their empathetic treatment of postbellum black male subjects positions Homer’s art miles away from the stereotypical painting of his peers.

'The Turtle Pound' (1898)

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Even here, however, having glimpsed “The Gulf Stream” at the show’s inception, we sense that the tide will soon turn. Homer’s luminous watercolors (c. 1885-99) of Caribbean shark fishermen and their broken boats in predatory, infested waters become—for all their dazzling, azure tonalities—ominous portents of the mesmerizing, climactic painting that awaits us and truly anchors the show. An ineffable image of a monumental black male adrift in perilous seas, at the mercy of nature and a world that offers him little in the way of hope, “The Gulf Stream” encapsulates the broader societal struggles and disparities of its era, as did many of Homer’s earlier works, and the painting’s relevance for our own divisive age is unmistakable.

'Northeaster' (1895)

Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

From his final studio overlooking the southern seacoast of Maine, Homer continued to paint scenes of conflict, but they were often now those of nature itself. Human scale and significance disappear in such celebrated works as his “Northeaster” (1895, reworked by 1901), an extravagant vision of rhythmic, crashing waves, flinging spume and treacherous slanted stones that summoned his most expressive brushwork to date. It is hard not to see such powerful late works, as critics have suggested, as meditations on his own mortality—though he would have argued otherwise—and as paeans to the forces of nature that increasingly dominated his art. Like Melville, Homer found in the sea the ultimate “infinite subject” and primal struggle his art had long delineated, and its eloquence has not diminished over time.

—Ms. Lewis, who taught art history for many years at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., writes about art for the Journal and other publications.