William Blake Exhibition Catalog 2022 - Flipbook - Page 6
Benson’s friend Winslow Homer was one of the few who rose to that
and haunting impact. In November 1865, he exhibited Veteran in a New
challenge. Already an up-and-coming observer of the American scene
Field, in which a demobilized soldier, back to the viewer, army jacket
for popular illustrated magazines, Homer traveled three times to the
and canteen lying nearby, toils at mowing down a wall of golden wheat
battlefront as an artist-reporter for Harper’s Weekly and composed lively
under a clear blue sky, his scythe evoking that of the Grim Reaper.
and often humorous scenes of camp life derived from sketches he made
In the same year, Homer created Trooper Meditating beside a Grave,
on the spot. Ambitious to become a full-fledged artist, he translated a
portraying another anonymous soldier, still in uniform, standing in a
number of his Civil War drawings and illustrations into easel paintings.
forest and gazing down at a wooden cross marking the burial place of
Some sustained the relatively lighthearted mood of the artist’s graphic
some unknown, perhaps a comrade. We have no access to this soldier’s
The Veteran in a New Field | Winslow Homer | 1865
Trooper Meditating Beside a Grave | Winslow Homer | 1865
output, but others ventured deeply into the severity of the war’s toll on
thoughts, but his partially unbuttoned jacket reveals a dark void
people and nature alike.
suggestive of sadness—or emptiness.
The Sharpshooter, Homer’s very first effort in that line, set the tone.
In none of these works did Homer depict actual violence, yet the
Unlike conventional history paintings, it is intimate in scale, propelling
sense of it is inescapable. We see no explicit carnage in Prisoners from the
us into close proximity with the anonymous shooter taking a bead on
Front, either. Instead, Homer encoded the war’s savagery in the lifeless
an unseen target from a precarious pine-tree perch. Much later, Homer
landscape of shattered tree trunks, extending as far as we can see on the
revealed the horror he had felt in observing the actions of Union
battlefield where Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow confronts
sharpshooters: to him they were, in essence, murderers. It was not until
three Confederate captives. The first, a dashing cavalier, glares defiantly
the war’s end, though, that Homer began to reckon with its profound
at his captor; the other two—a tattered old man and a youth wearing a hat
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