56 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
the safety of Homer’s studio, in New
York City. He’d moved from his na-
tive Boston in 1859, using the job at
Harper’s as security while enrolling in
life-drawing classes (one didn’t draw
naked bodies in art class in Boston)
and taking a few lessons in painting
technique from a transplanted French-
man. Mostly, though, his idea of paint-
ing grew out of his magazine illustra-
tions, and while some of this work
was brashly political—in 1860, he de-
picted Frederick Douglass, in mid-
oration, being expelled from a stage
by anti-abolitionists—the majority
were cheery anecdotes of contempo-
rary life. The first work he exhibited,
also in 1860, was a watercolor titled
“Skating in Central Park,” which sug-
gests the lightly amiable direction he
was taking before the war gave him a
subject and a purpose.
He visited the soldiers’ camps around
Washington in the fall of 1861 but was
not overly affected. He would have trav-
elled to Europe after that, to learn more
about painting, if he’d had the money.
The transformation came with his Vir-
ginia trip the following year. For two
or more months he was “without food
3 days at a time & all in camp either
died or were carried away with typhoid
fever,” his mother wrote to his younger
brother. “He came home so changed
that his best friends did not know him.”
The paper trail for Homer’s trips to
the front ends here. A new biography,
“Winslow Homer: American Passage,”
by William R. Cross (Farrar, Straus &
Giroux), confidently adds to the gen-
eral disagreement about where and
when (or even whether) he went back.
The chaotic Battle of the Wilderness?
The devastation at Spotsylvania Court
House? The long and catastrophic—
for both sides—siege of Petersburg?
His presence at these historic killing
fields has been deduced primarily from
the paintings and drawings he now
began to turn out with quiet intensity,
creating our richest artistic record of
the Civil War.
Coinciding with the biography, the
Metropolitan Museum’s grand yet the-
matically intent new Homer show, ti-
tled “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents,”
begins with a group of these paintings,
and it’s stirring to see the young, rela-
tively unschooled artist rise to eloquence
in service of his broken country. The
co-curator Sylvia Yount, setting out the
show’s pointedly contemporary theme,
writes, “A persistent fascination with
struggle permeates Homer’s art, reveal-
ing lifelong concerns with race and the
environment.” Homer can support these
not so new claims easily, although the
work is never rhetorical or preachy. A
viewer coming to the exhibition from
other American classics of the era in
the Met’s galleries, like the famous
mountain scenes by Bierstadt or Church,
may initially feel puzzled by the emo-
tional reserve, the understatement, even
the smaller scale of these works. As a
war painter, Homer was uncomfortable
with battle scenes—he painted only one,
a willfully unintelligible mayhem of men
and trees—and at odds with the heroic
posing of a European past. Several of his
paintings simply give us weary, home-
sick men in camp, in the mud and the
weather, enduring.
He even seemed to shy away from
painting corpses, although their rar-
ity in his work may have been partly
strategic. Alexander Gardner’s photo-
graphs of fields strewn with the dead
of Antietam, which drew huge crowds
when exhibited in New York, in 1862, of-
fered the lesson that the new art form,
in its cold reality, could shock as paint-
ings never could. Death, for Homer, is
a single former Union soldier standing
with his back to us, swinging a scythe
against a field of wheat as tall and end-less as the troops that fell at Antietam
and the other battlefields. He executed
the scene, titled “The Veteran in a New
Field,” like a plainspoken realist—the
high sunlight, the veteran’s rumpled shirt,
the shadowed stalks of wheat—who
couldn’t hide, try as he might, the dark
and troubled heart of a poet. At some
point, he changed his mind about what
he wanted to portray. Painting out parts
of a cradle scythe, the instrument used to
harvest wheat at the time, he left his vet-eran wielding the anachronistically stark
curve of a scythe that evoked images of
the Grim Reaper. All flesh is grass. Ye t
Homer was never casual about his titles,
and the veteran is also planting the earth
ane w. And they shall beat their swords into
plowshares. Neither the painter nor we
need choose a single meaning.T
wo paintings are set where Homer
could never have gone, behind
enemy lines. (The imaginative prerog-
atives of painting over photography are
also many.) “Defiance: Inviting a Shot
Before Petersburg,” of 1864, shows a
Confederate soldier who can endure no
longer. Leaping wildly atop fortifica-
tions meant as shelter, he stands ex-
posed against the open sky, shouting
tauntingly in the direction of massed
Yankee forces. A couple of distant puffs
of gun smoke suggest the ending to this
act of suicidal insanity—or insane brav-
ery, perhaps, for there is something he-
roic in this awful figure, so very different
from the sharpshooter, whose unremit-
ting eye was reported to drive troops to
nervous collapse.
The problematic figure here is not
the quixotic Rebel, though, toward whom
Homer extends a strained compassion,
but a Black banjo player huddled be-
hind the fortifications, strumming away,
his face a minstrel caricature of big pink
lips and rolling eyes. (Gwendolyn Du-
Bois Shaw, in the show’s catalogue, notes
that Homer would likely have used the
same burnt cork and lampblack that
minstrel players used to blacken their
faces.) This figure presses the question:
How far did Homer’s compassion ex-
tend in these years?
In the spontaneous act of drawing,
his eye was perfectly honest, sketching
Black men in the Union Army—a mule-
team driver, men riding a baggage
train—with individuality and dignity.
Even in the more public sphere of mag-
azine illustration, Black men—from
Douglass to a figure seated on what
looks to be a powder keg, illustrating
“Dixie”—are few but untouched by min-
strelsy. Questions have been raised about
a lithograph called “Our Jolly Cook”:
Is the frantically dancing Black man
performing for his own racially clichéd
pleasure or to meet the demands of an
audience of grim-faced white soldiers?
Homer brought Black soldiers to the