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| The Veteran in a New Field, by Winslow Homer, 1865 |
I’m in Maine for my last 2013 painting workshop! The frost
isn’t quite on the pumpkin (at least not in Rockland or Rochester) but autumn is
in the air. I’m leaving some wonderful fall landscapes for you.
To say that a work is the greatest painting of a great
painter is presumptuous, but I think this painting is Winslow Homer’s best. It
was painted at a black moment in our nation’s history: Robert E. Lee had
surrendered and President Lincoln had been assassinated just months earlier. The
nation was just starting to look at the scope of its loss: almost half a
million dead, another quarter million wounded.
This demobbed Union soldier holds his scythe like the Grim
Reaper. We know too clearly the nature of the implied harvest. And yet there is something redemptive and hopeful in it, an echo of Isaiah's “they will beat their swords into plowshares and their
spears into pruning hooks.”
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| The Pumpkin Patch, by Winslow Homer, 1878 (watercolor) |
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in
2014. Click here for
more information on my Maine workshops!
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