On the Front Lines
Harvard Art Museums examines Winslow Homer’s early career as a wartime illustrator
When asked about Winslow Homer, one might think of scenes from the sea or pastoral depictions of country life.
But before he became known for his oil paintings and watercolors, Homer reported from the front lines of the Civil War. His sketches of the fighting were engraved and printed in Harper’s Weekly, where they were seen by hundreds of thousands of people on the Union side of the conflict.
The works from this early period of Homer’s early career are the subject of the exhibition Winslow Homer: Eyewitness at Harvard Art Museums, on view through January 5, 2020.
“We’d been having a conversation about Winslow Homer at Harvard for many years, and we have a number of great Civil War historians on campus,”
says Ethan Lasser, formerly of the Harvard Art Museums and now the chair of Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He cocurated the exhibition with Makeda Best, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at Harvard Art
Museums.“we had the good fortune to borrow Musée d’orsay’s Summer Night a few years ago. I think that led us to start thinking harder about our own holdings and the stories we could tell with them.”
Today, there is constant concern over whether a piece of news is
“real” or “fake,” but this question of reliability isn’t a new one. In his role as an illustrator, Homer was tasked with creating true and compelling narratives for an audience that couldn’t see the front lines for themselves.
Homer is positioned as a witness, and Lasser says,“we’re thinking about all of the pressures on him as an illustrator of a magazine and how he developed a journalistic eye that he then takes into his career as a fine artist.”
Painted shortly after the end of the Civil War, Prisoners from the Front is a reckoning of all that Homer saw during his time reporting from the battlefield, even though it isn’t based on any specific incident. In it, a polished Union soldier keeps close watch on a group of haggard Confederate prisoners. Despite the brutality of the war, the painting maintains a sense of civility and hope
that the two sides will be able to move past the conflict.
Eyewitness isn’t limited to the illustrations and paintings Homer created to depict the war.works from later in his career, including The Lookout from 1882, are also on view. This watercolor shows a man and a woman keeping watch on a foggy sea. Like his illustrations from the Civil War, The Lookout showcases Homer’s skill as a documentarian while still maintaining a sense of drama.
“We want people to think in new ways about Homer’s career as an illustrator and think harder about the impact that his time as an illustrator had on his career as a painter and watercolorist,” Lasser says.
Winslow Homer: Eyewitness runs concurrently with Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey at the Cape Ann Museum.