Lot Essay
Little is known about Homer's early years in art except that he was apprenticed at about age 19 to John H. Bufford's lithography shop in Boston. Two years later he moved to New York where he entered a night class in drawing at the National Academy of Design. Only drawing from life was taught in this class, no painting.
In 1861 Homer is known to have taken some lessons in painting from Frederic Rondel (1826-1892), a minor painter from Boston who could not have taught him more than the rudimentary skills and elementary mechanics of painting. He was only twenty-six when he began to paint seriously, which was just two years before On Guard of 1864. Yet Homer, who could truly be said to be self-taught, showed none of the awkwardness in drawing nor mismanagement of color we might ordinarily expect from such early efforts in painting. In fact, Prisoners from the Front (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and The Morning Bell (Yale University Art Gallery) both painted in 1866 reveal a technical mastery remarkable in a man who had only begun to use oil paint five years previously.
A good portion of Homer's work, most especially in these early years, depict single figures, either in repose or engaged in solitary, intimate activity, such as The Initials (private collection) also of 1864. Here we see a young woman, quite obviously off by herself in a wÿood, working her initials, or most probably someone else's initials, inÿto the bark of a tree. As in On Guard, the figure is composed, introspective and absorbed in solitude; we are left to imagine for ourselves what state of mind accompanies such moments. The boy sitting on the wall in On Guard is similarly occupied: physically still and yet busy with a fantasy perhaps having something to do with the crows flying in the distance.
It is tempting, given the other major events of the day in 1864, to see political or social symbolism in the picture. The figure, who is perched somewhat uncertainly on a wall roughly and hastily made of white birch logs (lofty ideals, perhaps poorly defined) is literally, as we would say today, "sitting on the fence" which divides two fields, one of which is cultivated and on high ground, the other of which is in its natural state. The sky overhead is blue, a sign of hope, and yet there are high clouds, portending a change to come. Five or eight crows, also very distant and black, foreshadow a sinister influence and suggest that a violent change, over which we may have no control, is in the offing; a change which even a boy can detect and he signals this danger with a tiny red flag. Homer's subject is not really so much a symbol of prescience as he is a symbol of awareness and, through him, Homer exhorts his audience to a similar awareness, but without seeming to take a position of his own. The outcome of the war was by no means a certainty in 1864.
The subject, with minor variations, appears in a wood engraving, circa 1868 entitled Watching the Crows. The wood engraving is the frontispiece illustration in Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1944). Homer executed a drawing of the same subject, circa 1868, which is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (see J. Wilmerding, Winslow Homer, New York, 1972, p. 84, plates 3-1 and 3-2).
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer that is being compiled by Abigail Booth Gerdts.
In 1861 Homer is known to have taken some lessons in painting from Frederic Rondel (1826-1892), a minor painter from Boston who could not have taught him more than the rudimentary skills and elementary mechanics of painting. He was only twenty-six when he began to paint seriously, which was just two years before On Guard of 1864. Yet Homer, who could truly be said to be self-taught, showed none of the awkwardness in drawing nor mismanagement of color we might ordinarily expect from such early efforts in painting. In fact, Prisoners from the Front (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and The Morning Bell (Yale University Art Gallery) both painted in 1866 reveal a technical mastery remarkable in a man who had only begun to use oil paint five years previously.
A good portion of Homer's work, most especially in these early years, depict single figures, either in repose or engaged in solitary, intimate activity, such as The Initials (private collection) also of 1864. Here we see a young woman, quite obviously off by herself in a wÿood, working her initials, or most probably someone else's initials, inÿto the bark of a tree. As in On Guard, the figure is composed, introspective and absorbed in solitude; we are left to imagine for ourselves what state of mind accompanies such moments. The boy sitting on the wall in On Guard is similarly occupied: physically still and yet busy with a fantasy perhaps having something to do with the crows flying in the distance.
It is tempting, given the other major events of the day in 1864, to see political or social symbolism in the picture. The figure, who is perched somewhat uncertainly on a wall roughly and hastily made of white birch logs (lofty ideals, perhaps poorly defined) is literally, as we would say today, "sitting on the fence" which divides two fields, one of which is cultivated and on high ground, the other of which is in its natural state. The sky overhead is blue, a sign of hope, and yet there are high clouds, portending a change to come. Five or eight crows, also very distant and black, foreshadow a sinister influence and suggest that a violent change, over which we may have no control, is in the offing; a change which even a boy can detect and he signals this danger with a tiny red flag. Homer's subject is not really so much a symbol of prescience as he is a symbol of awareness and, through him, Homer exhorts his audience to a similar awareness, but without seeming to take a position of his own. The outcome of the war was by no means a certainty in 1864.
The subject, with minor variations, appears in a wood engraving, circa 1868 entitled Watching the Crows. The wood engraving is the frontispiece illustration in Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1944). Homer executed a drawing of the same subject, circa 1868, which is in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (see J. Wilmerding, Winslow Homer, New York, 1972, p. 84, plates 3-1 and 3-2).
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonné of the works of Winslow Homer that is being compiled by Abigail Booth Gerdts.