Lot Essay
When the Civil War broke out in early 1861, Winslow Homer was working in New York as a free-lance illustrator for Harper's Weekly and undertaking the first steps to becoming a painter: taking drawing lessons at the National Academy, taking painting instruction from a fellow artist and taking trips to the country to sketch from nature. Harper's interrupted these studies by sending the twenty-five year old Homer to the front for a week in October 1861 and again for two months in April 1862. During his visits to the Army of the Potomac, Homer gathered not only material for black and white magazine illustrations, but also ideas and experience that would inform his first attempts at oil painting, and indeed, his future direction as an artist. As Marc Simpson has written, "in these [paintings of the Civil War], his earliest works, we can see glimmerings of the themes of mortality, isolation, and nature's adversity that would come to dominate his later art." (Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, San Francisco, California, 1988, p. 13) Even in an ostensibly modest work such as Home, Sweet Home, one can recognize with hindsight all the elements that joined to make Homer one of America's finest painters: the timely subject matter that comments upon important national issues; the careful observation of nature that suggests a larger world beyond its literal description; and a powerful sense of brooding loneliness that portends the psychological ruptures of the early twentieth century.
Home, Sweet Home was one of two paintings to mark Homer's debut at the Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1863. More complex and less humorous than its companion, The Last Goose at Yorktown of circa 1863, it was the primary work that caught the attention of New York's major public and critical audience. Critics did not allow their unfamiliarity with the artist's name to diminish their admiration for the painting and its maker. "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...The delicacy and strength of emotion which reign throughout this little picture [Home, Sweet Home] are not surpassed in the entire exhibition," proclaimed one such critic. Another wrote:
WINSLOW HOMER is a new name in the catalogue of the Academy
pictures; but--if I may found a judgment on the works from his
easel now in the exhibition--one that must do honor to any
collection. Mr. Winslow Homer, in the picture entitled
"Home, Sweet Home," No. [371], shows a strength and boldness
in execution truly admirable. We hail it as a promise; we
accept it as a worthy achievement (both quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 146-47)
In its wealth of descriptive detail and narrative appeal, Home, Sweet Home betrays Homer's experience as a successful illustrator for popular magazines. It is well know that Homer used and refitted drawings across all media--paintings, watercolors, engravings--well into the late 1870s, when he gave up illustration for good. Yet this very early painting bears no relation to any of the illustrations published by Harper's in 1861 or 1862 after Homer's initial visits to the front. Unlike In Front of Yorktown of 1862/63 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), which is another very early effort and which draws upon field sketches that Homer also used for wood engravings, Home, Sweet Home is a unique composition. Homer seems to have wanted this debut painting to have no connection to his work for Harper's.
One of the closer comparisons available between this canvas and a Harper's engraving demonstrates how Homer, still a beginner in oil painting, was starting to think in different pictorial terms as he shifted from illustration to a new medium. Among the first drawings Homer produced for Harper's after his visit to the front in October was The Songs of the War, published on November 23, 1861 (figure a). The illustration is full of incident and anecdote, and draws upon stock figures and conventional motions for its rich compendium of rousing and humorous images. Two exceptions to the narrative crowing are the center vignette: a solitary woman who stands for "The Girl I Left Behind Me;" and the scene at bottom left: a large frame given over to only two figures, one of them carefully drawn and dramatically lighted. Seated on a barrel marked "Contraband" and wearing an expression of fear or apprehension, this presumably escaped slave provides an ironic twist to the label of "Dixie." Does this nervous man really "wish he were in the land of cotton?" Such double entendre, as well as the condensation of incident and meaning into the body of a solitary figure or two, are unusual in Homer's early illustrations, and would come to characterize the artist's mature painting. These features are present already in his Home, Sweet Home, despite a profusion of descriptive detail that seems appropriate to narrative illustration.
Homer's painting focuses on two soldiers in camp, one standing and the other seated on a crate, holding what appears to be a letter in his hand. Both seem lost in private thought as they listen to a regimental band playing in the distance. The painting's title, Home, Sweet Home, identifies the band's tune and suggests the content of the soldiers' musings, while commenting ironically on the assembled comforts of their camp. A small fire on which a pot of water or coffee boils, boughs of pine and holly to provide additional shade, posts and stakes on which to dry blankets and hang possessions, and of course, the ever-present and never-sufficient soldier's meal, two hardtack biscuits on a tin plate: for now, this is the soldier's "home, sweet home." Any viewer of the painting in the spring of 1863 could have readily imagined and personally interpreted the soldiers' circumstances and thoughts, for the lyric of the title was "perhaps more widely known than any other in the English language:"
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like Home!
...........................
An exile from Home, splendour dazzles in vain!--
Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again!--
The birds singing gaily that came at my call.--
Give me them!--and the peace of mind dearer than all!
Home, home! sweet, sweet sweet home!
There's no place like Home!
There's no place like Home!
With its convincing description of camp life, Homer's image might also have reminded some viewers, despite the daylight setting, of Walter Kittredge's "Tenting Tonight," a song whose popularity among soldiers increased as the war dragged on:
We're tenting tonight on the old camp ground.
Give us a song to cheer
Our weary hearts, a song of home,
And friends we love so dear.
Many are the hearts that are weary to-night
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts looking for the right,
to see the dawn of peace (both quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings fo the Civil War, p. 143-44).
Alluding to powerful emotions in this image, Homer avoided sentimentality by leaving the soldiers' features indistinct and their thoughts abstract. He described these men and their circumstances with precision, as if to insist on the authenticity of the scene, bearing witness with such details as the jagged rips and holes in the soldiers' blanket, the neatly punched holes in the hardtack biscuits, and the legible insignia on the soldiers' caps, which identifies them as infantrymen with Company G. (Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, p. 145) Critics accepted and praised the "truthfulness" of Homer's representation:
The picture illustrates a fact of camp life; and the artist
has left nothing out but the music...The picture, as a whole,
is a fine piece of objective work, and shows a genuine and
conscientious spirit. There is no clap-trap about it. Whatever
of force is in the picture is not the result of trickery, and is
not merely surface work, not admitting of examination, but
painstaking labor directed by thought (Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, p. 147).
Homer was able to convince his critics, because this is the war he witnessed. Visiting the Army of the Potomac as the guest of Colonel Francis Channing Barlow in April and May 1862, Homer had spent two months with Barlow's Sixty-first New York Infantry Regiment while the Army planned and waited for an assault on Yorktown, Virginia, that never materialized. Homer called himself "a camp follower," and helped Barlow out with the "cooking & scullion Dpt." Barlow described having a merry time with Homer--"I have not laughed so much since I left home"--but the artist's mother later reported a different version: "He suffered much, was without food three days at a time and all in camp either died or were carried away with typhoid fever... He came home so changed that his best friends did not know him, but is well and all right now" (N. Cikovsky, Jr., and F. Kelly, Winslow Homer, Washington, DC, 1995, pp. 20-21, 58-59; also Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 19-20, 38). Homer shared the boredom, excitement, restlessness, and privation of the common soldier, and realized the central importance of these men to the war and its portrayal. As Nicolai Cikovsky has observed:
It was a war fought by citizen soldiers,...a war fought not for
territorial conquest but for the ideals of American democracy
and the still new and untested federal Union. The Civil War
made traditional martial pageantry--"long lines advancing and
maneuvering, led on by generals in cocked hats and by bands of
music," as a contemporary described them--very quickly obsolete.
Hence the ordinary individual soldier, in conditions far from
heroic and ceremonial, that figured repeatedly, and almost from the first, in Homer's paintings. (in Winslow Homer, p. 24)
By the spring of 1863, when the National Academy show opened, the previously presumed success of the Union offensive was in serious doubt. Lincoln had removed the over-cautious General George McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac in November of the previous year, but the disastrous battle of Fredericksburg in December had shocked the North and cut deeply into army morale. The situation began to improve under General Joseph Hooker, appointed in late January 1863, but antiwar sentiment among New York Democrats was increasing, particularly after Congress enacted a draft resolution in March. The tensions brewing in New York City that spring would erupt in ugly draft riots by July; the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg were still months away. In this uncertain and troubled time, Homer's image took no sides. Focusing on the general experience of individual soldiers, and describing their circumstances with care and delicacy, the artist ensured a sympathetic response in his audience, whatever their position on the war. The painting continues to do so today.
Christie's is grateful to Sally Mills for contributing this catalogue essay.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer.
Home, Sweet Home was one of two paintings to mark Homer's debut at the Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design in 1863. More complex and less humorous than its companion, The Last Goose at Yorktown of circa 1863, it was the primary work that caught the attention of New York's major public and critical audience. Critics did not allow their unfamiliarity with the artist's name to diminish their admiration for the painting and its maker. "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...The delicacy and strength of emotion which reign throughout this little picture [Home, Sweet Home] are not surpassed in the entire exhibition," proclaimed one such critic. Another wrote:
WINSLOW HOMER is a new name in the catalogue of the Academy
pictures; but--if I may found a judgment on the works from his
easel now in the exhibition--one that must do honor to any
collection. Mr. Winslow Homer, in the picture entitled
"Home, Sweet Home," No. [371], shows a strength and boldness
in execution truly admirable. We hail it as a promise; we
accept it as a worthy achievement (both quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 146-47)
In its wealth of descriptive detail and narrative appeal, Home, Sweet Home betrays Homer's experience as a successful illustrator for popular magazines. It is well know that Homer used and refitted drawings across all media--paintings, watercolors, engravings--well into the late 1870s, when he gave up illustration for good. Yet this very early painting bears no relation to any of the illustrations published by Harper's in 1861 or 1862 after Homer's initial visits to the front. Unlike In Front of Yorktown of 1862/63 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut), which is another very early effort and which draws upon field sketches that Homer also used for wood engravings, Home, Sweet Home is a unique composition. Homer seems to have wanted this debut painting to have no connection to his work for Harper's.
One of the closer comparisons available between this canvas and a Harper's engraving demonstrates how Homer, still a beginner in oil painting, was starting to think in different pictorial terms as he shifted from illustration to a new medium. Among the first drawings Homer produced for Harper's after his visit to the front in October was The Songs of the War, published on November 23, 1861 (figure a). The illustration is full of incident and anecdote, and draws upon stock figures and conventional motions for its rich compendium of rousing and humorous images. Two exceptions to the narrative crowing are the center vignette: a solitary woman who stands for "The Girl I Left Behind Me;" and the scene at bottom left: a large frame given over to only two figures, one of them carefully drawn and dramatically lighted. Seated on a barrel marked "Contraband" and wearing an expression of fear or apprehension, this presumably escaped slave provides an ironic twist to the label of "Dixie." Does this nervous man really "wish he were in the land of cotton?" Such double entendre, as well as the condensation of incident and meaning into the body of a solitary figure or two, are unusual in Homer's early illustrations, and would come to characterize the artist's mature painting. These features are present already in his Home, Sweet Home, despite a profusion of descriptive detail that seems appropriate to narrative illustration.
Homer's painting focuses on two soldiers in camp, one standing and the other seated on a crate, holding what appears to be a letter in his hand. Both seem lost in private thought as they listen to a regimental band playing in the distance. The painting's title, Home, Sweet Home, identifies the band's tune and suggests the content of the soldiers' musings, while commenting ironically on the assembled comforts of their camp. A small fire on which a pot of water or coffee boils, boughs of pine and holly to provide additional shade, posts and stakes on which to dry blankets and hang possessions, and of course, the ever-present and never-sufficient soldier's meal, two hardtack biscuits on a tin plate: for now, this is the soldier's "home, sweet home." Any viewer of the painting in the spring of 1863 could have readily imagined and personally interpreted the soldiers' circumstances and thoughts, for the lyric of the title was "perhaps more widely known than any other in the English language:"
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like Home!
...........................
An exile from Home, splendour dazzles in vain!--
Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again!--
The birds singing gaily that came at my call.--
Give me them!--and the peace of mind dearer than all!
Home, home! sweet, sweet sweet home!
There's no place like Home!
There's no place like Home!
With its convincing description of camp life, Homer's image might also have reminded some viewers, despite the daylight setting, of Walter Kittredge's "Tenting Tonight," a song whose popularity among soldiers increased as the war dragged on:
We're tenting tonight on the old camp ground.
Give us a song to cheer
Our weary hearts, a song of home,
And friends we love so dear.
Many are the hearts that are weary to-night
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts looking for the right,
to see the dawn of peace (both quoted in Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings fo the Civil War, p. 143-44).
Alluding to powerful emotions in this image, Homer avoided sentimentality by leaving the soldiers' features indistinct and their thoughts abstract. He described these men and their circumstances with precision, as if to insist on the authenticity of the scene, bearing witness with such details as the jagged rips and holes in the soldiers' blanket, the neatly punched holes in the hardtack biscuits, and the legible insignia on the soldiers' caps, which identifies them as infantrymen with Company G. (Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, p. 145) Critics accepted and praised the "truthfulness" of Homer's representation:
The picture illustrates a fact of camp life; and the artist
has left nothing out but the music...The picture, as a whole,
is a fine piece of objective work, and shows a genuine and
conscientious spirit. There is no clap-trap about it. Whatever
of force is in the picture is not the result of trickery, and is
not merely surface work, not admitting of examination, but
painstaking labor directed by thought (Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, p. 147).
Homer was able to convince his critics, because this is the war he witnessed. Visiting the Army of the Potomac as the guest of Colonel Francis Channing Barlow in April and May 1862, Homer had spent two months with Barlow's Sixty-first New York Infantry Regiment while the Army planned and waited for an assault on Yorktown, Virginia, that never materialized. Homer called himself "a camp follower," and helped Barlow out with the "cooking & scullion Dpt." Barlow described having a merry time with Homer--"I have not laughed so much since I left home"--but the artist's mother later reported a different version: "He suffered much, was without food three days at a time and all in camp either died or were carried away with typhoid fever... He came home so changed that his best friends did not know him, but is well and all right now" (N. Cikovsky, Jr., and F. Kelly, Winslow Homer, Washington, DC, 1995, pp. 20-21, 58-59; also Simpson, Winslow Homer Paintings of the Civil War, pp. 19-20, 38). Homer shared the boredom, excitement, restlessness, and privation of the common soldier, and realized the central importance of these men to the war and its portrayal. As Nicolai Cikovsky has observed:
It was a war fought by citizen soldiers,...a war fought not for
territorial conquest but for the ideals of American democracy
and the still new and untested federal Union. The Civil War
made traditional martial pageantry--"long lines advancing and
maneuvering, led on by generals in cocked hats and by bands of
music," as a contemporary described them--very quickly obsolete.
Hence the ordinary individual soldier, in conditions far from
heroic and ceremonial, that figured repeatedly, and almost from the first, in Homer's paintings. (in Winslow Homer, p. 24)
By the spring of 1863, when the National Academy show opened, the previously presumed success of the Union offensive was in serious doubt. Lincoln had removed the over-cautious General George McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac in November of the previous year, but the disastrous battle of Fredericksburg in December had shocked the North and cut deeply into army morale. The situation began to improve under General Joseph Hooker, appointed in late January 1863, but antiwar sentiment among New York Democrats was increasing, particularly after Congress enacted a draft resolution in March. The tensions brewing in New York City that spring would erupt in ugly draft riots by July; the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg were still months away. In this uncertain and troubled time, Homer's image took no sides. Focusing on the general experience of individual soldiers, and describing their circumstances with care and delicacy, the artist ensured a sympathetic response in his audience, whatever their position on the war. The painting continues to do so today.
Christie's is grateful to Sally Mills for contributing this catalogue essay.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer.