Odysseus has survived monsters, storms and gods. Here, the thing that breaks him is distance.

Alexander Rothaug shows him alone by the sea, folded into himself, with Ithaca somewhere beyond the dark water. There is no battle in the painting, no ship, no goddess, no dramatic rescue. Just the weight of wanting to go home and not knowing when the journey will end.

That is the deepest ache of Homer’s Odyssey: not adventure, but longing. Rothaug turns the hero into a man who has carried the sea for too long.