THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 55A
soldier in blue sits high on the
branch of a pine tree. The barrel of
his rifle, jutting hard across the canopy
of green, is mounted with a lens that he
holds close to his eye as he takes aim.
We can’t see his face. Neither can the
man he is about to kill, down below, hun-
dreds of yards away, whether in the midst
of battle or furtively leaving camp to fill
canteens—many soldiers got shot this
way—or simply lifting his head above
fortifications to take a breath. The tele-
scopic rif le, widely introduced in this
country during the Civil War, allowed© THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
for attack with unprecedented stealth, a
technological leap akin in our time to
the military drone. In the spring of 1862,
Winslow Homer observed the sharp-
shooting soldiers trained to use these
weapons while encamped with the Union
Army at the Virginia front. Homer, at
twenty-six, was a professional artist-
reporter, his drawings often reproduced
in the illustrated press. He aspired, how-
ever, to be a painter. “Sharpshooter,” by
reliable account his first oil painting,
completed in 1863, was preceded in the
public eye by his engraving of the samehawkeyed soldier in Harper’s Weekly, part
of the excitement over the élite new unit’s
efficacy and skill. It would be easy to as-
sume that he shared the excitement—
his soldier has a mesmerizing energy and
focus—were it not for a randomly sur-
viving letter he wrote decades later, re-
calling that the use of these rifles had
struck him “as being as near murder as
anything I ever could think of in con-
nection with the army.” He added a quick
drawing of an unsuspecting victim framed
in a rifle’s crosshairs.
“Sharpshooter” was painted back inA CRITICAT LARGETHE COLORIST
What the Civil War taught Winslow Homer about race in America.BYCLAUDIAROTHPIERPONT“Dressing for the Carnival ” (1877). Its brightly colored, singing beauty is such that tragedy takes hold only on examination.THE CRITICS