Andrew Wyeth

Night Hauling 1944

Tempera on masonite

Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine

Night Hauling was painted by the twenty-seven-year-old Andrew Wyeth at the height of World War Two. Set against the Maine coast in Port Clyde, where Wyeth’s family summered, it depicts a shadowy lobsterman hauling in a trap under cover of darkness, the scene lit only by the figure’s concealed lamp and the water’s startling nocturnal phosphorescence.