A Veteran in a New Field, c.1865

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A Veteran in a New Field, c.1865

• Winslow Homer
• 1836 - 1910

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Winslow Homer c. 1890

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Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 September 29,
1910)

• an American landscape painter and printmaker,
  best known for his marine subjects.
• He is considered one of the foremost painters in
  19th century America and a preeminent figure in
  American art.

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• Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836, Homer was
  the second of three sons of Charles Savage Homer
  and Henrietta Benson Homer, both from long lines
  of New Englanders.
• His mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist and
  Homers first teacher, and she and her son had a
  close relationship throughout their lives. Homer
  took on many of her traits, including her quiet,
  strong-willed, terse, sociable nature her dry
  sense of humor and her artistic talent.

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• Largely self-taught, Homer began his career
  working as a commercial illustrator.

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• He took up oil painting and produced major studio
  works characterized by the weight and density he
  exploited from the medium.
• He also worked extensively in watercolor,
  creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily
  chronicling his working vacations.

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• Homer had a happy childhood, growing up mostly in
  then rural Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• He was an average student, but his art talent was
  on display early.

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• Homers father was a volatile, restless
  businessman who was always looking to make a
  killing.
• When Homer was thirteen, Charles gave up the
  hardware store business to seek a fortune in the
  California gold rush.
• When that failed, Charles left his family and
  went to Europe to raise capital for other
  get-rich-quick schemes that didnt materialize.

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• After Homers high school graduation, his father
  saw an ad in the newspaper and arranged for an
  apprenticeship.
• Homers apprenticeship to a Boston commercial
  lithographer at the age of 19, was a formative
  but treadmill experience.

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• He worked repetitively on sheet music covers and
  other commercial work for two years.
• By 1857, his freelance career was underway after
  he turned down an offer to join the staff of
  Harper's Weekly.
• From the time I took my nose off that
  lithographic stone, Homer later stated, I have
  had no master, and never shall have any.

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• Homers career as an illustrator lasted nearly
  twenty years.
• He contributed to magazines such as Ballou's
  Pictorial and Harper's Weekly

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• The market for illustrations was growing rapidly,
  and when fads and fashions were changing quickly.
  
• His early works, mostly commercial engravings of
  urban and country social scenes, are
  characterized by clean outlines, simplified
  forms, dramatic contrast of light and dark, and
  lively figure groupings qualities that remained
  important throughout his career.
• His quick success was mostly due to this strong
  understanding of graphic design and also to the
  adaptability of his designs to wood engraving.

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Homer's studio

• In 1859, he opened a studio in the Tenth Street
  Studio Building in New York City, the artistic
  and publishing capital of the United States.
• Until 1863 he attended classes at the National
  Academy of Design, and studied briefly with
  Frédéric Rondel, who taught him the basics of
  painting.

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• In only about a year of self-training, Homer was
  producing excellent oil work.
• His mother tried to raise family funds to send
  him to Europe for further study but instead
  Harper's sent Homer to the front lines of the
  American Civil War (18611865), where he sketched
  battle scenes and camp life, the quiet moments as
  well as the murderous ones.

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• His initial sketches were of the camp,
  commanders, and army of the famous Union officer,
  Major General George B. McClellan, at the banks
  of the Potomac River in October, 1861.

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• Although the drawings did not get much attention
  at the time, they mark Homer's expanding skills
  from illustrator to painter.
• Like with his urban scenes, Homer also
  illustrated women during war time, and showed the
  effects of the war on the home front.

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• The war work was dangerous and exhausting.
• Back at his studio, however, Homer would regain
  his strength and re-focus his artistic vision.
• He set to work on a series of war-related
  paintings based on his sketches, among them
  Sharpshooter on Picket Duty (1862), Home, Sweet
  Home (1863), and Prisoners from the Front (1866)

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Sharpshooter on Picket Duty

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Home Sweet Home

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Prisoners from the Front

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• He exhibited Home, Sweet Home at the National
  Academy and its remarkable critical reception
  resulted in its quick sale.
• Homer was elected into the National Academy as an
  Associate Academician, then a full Academician in
  1865.

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• After the war, Homer turned his attention
  primarily to scenes of childhood and young women,
  reflecting nostalgia for simpler times, both his
  own and the nation as a whole.
• His Crossing the Pasture (18711872) depicts two
  boys who idealize brotherhood with the hope of a
  united future after the war that pitted brother
  against brother.

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• At nearly the beginning of his painting career,
  the twenty-seven year old Homer demonstrated a
  maturity of feeling, depth of perception, and
  mastery of technique which was immediately
  recognized.
• His realism was objective, true to nature, and
  emotionally controlled.

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One critic wrote,

• Winslow Homer is one of those few young
  artists who make a decided impression of their
  power with their very first contributions to the
  Academy...He at this moment wields a better
  pencil, models better, colors better, than many
  whom, were it not improper, we could mention as
  regular contributors to the Academy.

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Critics wrote of Home, Sweet Home specifically,

• There is no clap-trap about it. The delicacy
  and strength of emotion which reign throughout
  this little picture are not surpassed in the
  whole exhibition. It is a work of real feeling,
  soldiers in camp listening to the evening band,
  and thinking of the wives and darlings far away.
  There is no strained effect in it, no
  sentimentality, but a hearty, homely actuality,
  broadly, freely, and simply worked out.

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Early landscapes and watercolors

• After exhibiting at the National Academy of
  Design, Homer finally traveled to Paris, France
  in 1867 where he remained for a year.
• His most praised early painting, Prisoners from
  the Front, was on exhibit at the Exposition
  Universelle in Paris at the same time.
• He did not study formally but he practiced
  landscape painting while continuing to work for
  Harper's, depicting scenes of Parisian life.

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Prisoners from the Front

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• Homer painted about a dozen small paintings
  during the stay. Although he arrived in France at
  a time of new fashions in art, Homer's main
  subject for his paintings was peasant life,
  showing more of an alignment with the established
  French Barbizon school and the artist Millet than
  with newer artists Manet and Courbet.

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Manet

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• Though his interest in depicting natural light
  parallels that of the early impressionists, there
  is no evidence of direct influence as he was
  already a plein-air painter in America and had
  already evolved a personal style which was much
  closer to Manet than Monet.

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Monet

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• Unfortunately, Homer was very private about his
  personal life and his methods (even denying his
  first biographer any personal information or
  commentary), but his stance was clearly one of
  independence of style and a devotion to American
  subjects.
• As his fellow artist Eugene Benson wrote, Homer
  believed that artists should never look at
  pictures but should stutter in a language of
  their own.

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• Throughout the 1870s Homer continued painting
  mostly rural or idyllic scenes of farm life,
  children playing, and young adults courting,
  including Country School (1871) and The Morning
  Bell (1872).
• In 1875, Homer quit working as a commercial
  illustrator and vowed to survive on his paintings
  and watercolors alone.
• Despite his excellent critical reputation, his
  finances continued to remain precarious.

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Country School
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The Morning Bell

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• His popular 1872 painting, Snap-the-Whip, was
  exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in
  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as was one of his
  finest and most famous paintings Breezing Up
  (1876). Of his work at this time, Henry James
  wrote
• "We frankly confess that we detest his
  subjects...he has chosen the least pictorial
  range of scenery and civilization he has
  resolutely treated them as if they were
  pictorial...and, to reward his audacity, he has
  incontestably succeeded."

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Snap-The-Whip

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• Many disagreed with James. Breezing Up, Homers
  iconic painting of a father and three boys out
  for a spirited sail, received wide praise.
• The New York Tribune wrote, There is no picture
  in this exhibition, nor can we remember when
  there has been a picture in any exhibition, that
  can be named alongside this.

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• Visits to Petersburg, Virginia around 1876
  resulted in paintings of rural African American
  life.
• The same straightforward sensibility which
  allowed Homer to distill art from these
  potentially sentimental subjects also yielded the
  most unaffected views of African American life at
  the time, as illustrated in Dressing for the
  Carnival (1877) and A Visit from the Old Mistress
  (1876)

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Dressed for the Carnival
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A Visit from the Old Mistress

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• Homer started painting with watercolors on a
  regular basis in 1873 during a summer stay in
  Gloucester, Massachusetts.
• From the beginning, his technique was natural,
  fluid and confident, demonstrating his innate
  talent for a difficult medium.
• His impact would be revolutionary.

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• Here, again, the critics were puzzled at first,
  "A child with an ink bottle could not have done
  worse.
• Another critic said that Homer made a sudden and
  desperate plunge into water color painting.
• But his watercolors proved popular and enduring,
  and sold more readily, improving his financial
  condition considerably.

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Schooner at Sunset
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Sailing a Dory

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House in Santigo Cuba

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Blackboard

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The Fog Warning
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Eight Bells

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• After General Robert E. Lees surrender at
  Appomattox in April 1865, the Union and
  Confederate armies were peacefully disbanded.

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• The soldiers who had survived the ordeal were
  free to go home and resume their pre-war
  occupations.

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• Painted through summer and fall 1865, not long
  after the nation came to grips with Robert E.
  Lee's surrender and mourned President Lincoln's
  assassinationboth of which occurred during the
  second week of April
• Homer's canvas shows an emblematic farmer who
  is a Union veteran, as signified by his discarded
  jacket and canteen at the lower right.

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• The painting seems to blend several related
  narratives.
• Most soldiers had been farmers before the war.
• This man, who has returned to his field, holds an
  old-fashioned scythe that evokes the Grim Reaper,
  recalls the war's harvest of death, and expresses
  grief at Lincoln's murder.

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• The redemptive feature is the bountiful wheata
  northern cropwhich could connote the Union's
  victory.

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• With its dual references to death and life,
  Homer's iconic composition offers a powerful
  meditation on America's sacrifices and its
  potential for recovery.

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• The Veteran in a New Field depicts one of those
  Civil War veterans recently returned from the
  front, harvesting a field of grain in the midday
  sun.

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• The wheat has grown high, and the field stretches
  all the way to the horizon
• An unusually bountiful crop had, in fact, marked
  the end of the war.

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• The farmers military jacket and canteen (with an
  insignia that identifies him as a former Union
  soldier) lie discarded in the foreground, almost
  covered by fallen stalks of grain.

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• Winslow Homer completed The Veteran in a New
  Field in the autumn of 1865, only a few months
  after Appomattox.
• The artist was a sort of veteran himself, having
  served on the front as an illustrator for the New
  York periodical Harpers Weekly.

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• In the sketches he made to accompany military
  reports, Homer tended to focus on the commonplace
  activities of a soldiers life rather than the
  climax of combat.

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• When he returned to civilian life and began to
  paint in oil, Homer continued to favor themes
  from ordinary life, such as this image of a
  soldier resuming work in the fields.

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• The optimistic spirit of Homers painting only
  makes its darker undertones more moving.
• The new field of the title cant mean this
  field of grain, which is obviously mature and
  ready to harvest.
• It must refer instead to the change in the
  veterans occupationwhich necessarily calls to
  mind his previous activity on the battlefield.

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• Because some of the bloodiest battles of the
  Civil War had been fought in wheat fields, fields
  of grain, in popular consciousness, were
  associated with fields of fallen soldiers.

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• One particularly disturbing photograph of
  soldiers who had died in battle at Gettysburg was
  published with the title
• A Harvest of Death.

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• In keeping with those undertones, Homers veteran
  handles a single-bladed scythe.

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• By 1865, that simple farming implement was
  already out of date a farmer would have used the
  more efficient cradle to mow a field that size.

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• In the original version of the painting, the
  veteran did work with a cradled scythe (its
  outline is faintly visible on the left side of
  the canvas), but Homer evidently decided to paint
  it out.

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• He replaced an emblem of modern technology with
  the more archaic tool, and gave a picture of a
  farmer in his field an unsettling reference to
  the work of the Grim Reaper, the age-old
  personification of death.

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• The Veteran in a New Field refers both to the
  desolation caused by the war and
• the countrys hope for the future.

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• It summons up the conflicting emotions that
  took hold of Americans
• Relief that the Civil War was over,
• and
• Grief for the many lives that had been lost.

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• Nor did the loss of lives end on the
  battlefield
• Only days after Appomattox came the
  assassination of Abraham Lincoln
• The nation sank into a collective state of
  mourning.

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• The Veteran in a New Field thus takes on another
  dimension,
• An expression of despair over the senseless death
  of a great president.

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• The image of a soldier returning to his farm
  would have reassured Homers audience that life
  went on.

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• The veteran appears to have set aside his Army
  training along with what remained of his military
  uniform to harvest a field that once again yields
  the gift of golden wheat, which in Christianity
  is a symbol of salvation.

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• Even in the aftermath of the worst disasters, the
  artist seems to say, life has the capacity to
  restore itself.

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Influence

• Homer never taught in a school or privately, but
  his works strongly influenced succeeding
  generations of American painters for their direct
  and energetic interpretation of man's stoic
  relationship to an often neutral and sometimes
  harsh wilderness.

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• American illustrator and teacher Howard Pyle
  revered Homer and encouraged his students to
  study him.
• His student and fellow illustrator, N. C. Wyeth
  (and through him Andrew Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth),
  shared the influence and appreciation, even
  following Homer to Maine for inspiration.
• The elder Wyeths respect for his antecedent was
  intense and absolute, and can be observed in
  his early work Mowing (1907).

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The Mowing, by NC Weyth

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• Perhaps Homer's austere individualism is best
  captured in his admonition to artists
• "Look at nature, work independently, and solve
  your own problems."

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The Lifeline
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Civil War Dresses
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Glouster

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Come Up From the Fields Father

• Come up from the fields, father, here's a letter
  from our Pete, And come to the front door,
  mother, here's      a letter from thy dear son.
  Lo, 'tis autumn, Lo, where the trees, deeper
  green, yellower and redder, Cool and sweeten
  Ohio's villages with leaves      fluttering in
  the moderate wind, Where apples ripe in the
  orchards hang and     grapes on the trellis'd
  vines, (Smell you the smell of the grapes on the
  vines? Smell you the buckwheat where the bees
  were lately buzzing?)

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• Above all, lo, the sky so calm, so transparent
       after the rain, and with wondrous clouds,
  Below too, all calm, all vital and beautiful,
       and the farm prospers well. Down in the
  fields all prospers well, But now from the
  fields come, father, come      at the daughter's
  call, And come to the entry, mother, to the
  front door come right away. Fast as she can she
  hurries, something ominous,      her steps
  trembling,

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• She does not tarry to smooth her hair nor     
  adjust her cap. Open the envelope quickly, 0
  this is not our son's writing, yet his name     
  is sign'd, 0 a strange hand writes for our dear
  son,      0 stricken mother's soul! All swims
  before her eyes, flashes with black,      she
  catches the main words only, Sentences broken,
  gunshot wound in the breast,      cavalry
  skirmish, taken to hospital, At present low, but
  will soon be better. Ah, now the single figure to
  me, Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all
       its cities and farms, Sickly white in the
  face and dull in the head,     very faint, By
  the jamb of a door leans. Grieve not so, dear
  mother (the just-grown      daughter speaks
  through her sobs, The little sisters huddle
  around speechless and      dismay'd),

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• See, dearest mother, the letter says Pete will
       soon be better. Alas, poor boy, he will
  never be better (nor maybe      needs to be
  better, that brave and simple soul), While they
  stand at home at the door he is      dead
  already, The only son is dead. But the mother
  needs to be better, She with thin form presently
  drest in black, By day her meals untouch'd, then
  at night      fitfully sleeping, often waking,
  In the midnight waking, weeping, longing with
       one deep longing, 0 that she might
  withdraw unnoticed, silent      from life escape
  and withdraw, To follow, to seek, to be with her
  dear dead      son.
• -Walt
  Whitman

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Essay Question 1

• Because a seemingly dead seed buried in the
  ground rises as a new plant, grain can be a
  symbol of rebirth or new beginnings.
• What might a bountiful field of wheat represent?
• What might this suggest about the country after
  the Civil War?

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Essay Question 2

• If this man had been in a grain field the
  previous year, what would he have been doing?

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Essay Question 3

• Please identify the symbolism found in the
  painting, A Veteran in a New Field.