Lot Essay
The Noon Recess is one of a group of paintings, drawings and engravings of an old-fashioned single room schoolhouse that Homer executed during the 1870s. This series includes The Country School (St. Louis Art Museum), showing the same schoolmistress teaching a class, School Time (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon), and two versions of Snap the Whip (The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Butler Institute of American Art), which depict the same schoolhouse and related outdoor activities. Gordon Hendricks believed that all five pictures depicted the schoolroom in Hurley, New York where Homer is known to have spent the summer of 1872, but Cikovsky has suggested that Homer may have assembled the images from sketches of various elements made during previous summers in the Catskills, or even from sketches done in his New York studio.
The paintings share both nostalgia for the rapidly vanishing world of the one-room schoolhouse, and enthusiasm for the new post-war educational methods and philosphies, represented by the emerging status of women in post-war society and their participation as teachers in the educational system. As noted by The Ohio Educational Monthly in 1872, "The capture of the common school" by women instructors was "one of the most vital social changes wrought by our great civil war, [as] large numbers of our schoolmasters went off to war and never came home." The old stereotype of the brutal schoolmaster, educating by the whip rather than the book, was replaced by the image of a professional woman, whose normal school training and natural "softening influence" were appropriate to a new concept of education as the guidance of an innately good child, rather than the stern discipline of a wicked one. The Noon Recess "exemplifies [an] enlightened, kindly tolerant discipline, which is as much punishment for the teacher as for the pupil."
In June 1973 a related engraving by Homer, also titled The Noon Recess, was published in Harper's Weekly. Although similar in composition, the engraving is more anecdotal in its depiction of the modern schoolroom. Symbols of educational reform, like the blackboard and the map (study aids that had increased in popularity as liberal teaching methods emerged), figure prominently in the engraving, but are abstracted in the painting.
There is also a subtle difference in mood. In the engraving, the blond boy, ordered to stay indoors during recess, reads peacefully, while the teacher, ironically, looks unhappy and imprisoned. In the painting, the teacher's scowl has been replaced by a softer, more thoughtful gaze, suggesting nostalgia for the post-war disappearance of the country school. The students seen playing outdoors, framed by the central window, evoke an innocence and exuberance that had been lost during the preceding years of conflict.
The Noon Recess was known by the title of Kept In until its exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in 1936. It was donated anonymously by Stephen C. Clark to the exhibition/sale to benefit men in the service held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, where Edwin D. Hewitt purchased it.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonne of the wokrs of Winslow Homer.
The paintings share both nostalgia for the rapidly vanishing world of the one-room schoolhouse, and enthusiasm for the new post-war educational methods and philosphies, represented by the emerging status of women in post-war society and their participation as teachers in the educational system. As noted by The Ohio Educational Monthly in 1872, "The capture of the common school" by women instructors was "one of the most vital social changes wrought by our great civil war, [as] large numbers of our schoolmasters went off to war and never came home." The old stereotype of the brutal schoolmaster, educating by the whip rather than the book, was replaced by the image of a professional woman, whose normal school training and natural "softening influence" were appropriate to a new concept of education as the guidance of an innately good child, rather than the stern discipline of a wicked one. The Noon Recess "exemplifies [an] enlightened, kindly tolerant discipline, which is as much punishment for the teacher as for the pupil."
In June 1973 a related engraving by Homer, also titled The Noon Recess, was published in Harper's Weekly. Although similar in composition, the engraving is more anecdotal in its depiction of the modern schoolroom. Symbols of educational reform, like the blackboard and the map (study aids that had increased in popularity as liberal teaching methods emerged), figure prominently in the engraving, but are abstracted in the painting.
There is also a subtle difference in mood. In the engraving, the blond boy, ordered to stay indoors during recess, reads peacefully, while the teacher, ironically, looks unhappy and imprisoned. In the painting, the teacher's scowl has been replaced by a softer, more thoughtful gaze, suggesting nostalgia for the post-war disappearance of the country school. The students seen playing outdoors, framed by the central window, evoke an innocence and exuberance that had been lost during the preceding years of conflict.
The Noon Recess was known by the title of Kept In until its exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in 1936. It was donated anonymously by Stephen C. Clark to the exhibition/sale to benefit men in the service held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, where Edwin D. Hewitt purchased it.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming Spanierman Gallery/CUNY/Goodrich/Whitney catalogue raisonne of the wokrs of Winslow Homer.