User:Petropoxy (Lithoderm Proxy)/Sunday Morning in Virginia

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Sunday Morning in Virginia
ArtistWinslow Homer
Year1877
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions46.8 cm × 61 cm (18.4 in × 24 in)
LocationCincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati

Sunday Morning in Virginia is an 1877 oil painting by Winslow Homer depicting a Reconstruction era scene of African American children learning to read from the Bible. is an 1876 painting by American artist, Winslow Homer. It was one of several works that Homer created during a mid-1870s visit to Virginia, where he had served as a war correspondent during the Civil War.[1]

Scholars have noted that the painting shares a compositional structure with A Visit from the Old Mistress, whose composition in turn is taken from Homer's earlier painting Prisoners from the Front, which depicts a group of captive Confederate soldiers defiantly regarding a Union officer.[2]

It, along with Homer's other paintings of black southern life from this period, have been praised as an "invaluable record of an important segment of life in Virginia during the Reconstruction."[1]


Background[edit]

Near Andersonville, 1866, Newark Museum of Art, Newark
  • Homer had long history of depicting African American subjects; career as a commercial illustrator
  • Had front-row seat to the core of the national conflict during the ACW; this was the crux of the change in his attitudes; particularly Near Andersonville[3]
  • Development of his depictions of blacks over time, from genre to sympathy, tracked over the course of his career







Origin and development[edit]

Thomas Waterman Wood, Sunday Morning, c. 1877, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
  • Homer's reconstruction era trip (or trips?) to the South, and the speculative timeline of them
  • Which of the paintings from this period of his work are assumed to be mostly based on life sketches, and which are constructed from modeling sessions in the studio.
  • Anecdotes re. conflict from between Homer and his black models during VA trip. There are a bunch of other anecdotes about his time in the south that appear to be BS though, so keep that in mind.
  • Other, similar paintings of the same subject - Thomas Waterman Wood[4]
  • This could be a little thin - maybe more here?


Homer made at least one, and perhaps several, trips to Virginia during the 1870s. The exact number and timing of these trips has long been a topic of scholarly speculation owing to lack of records. Homer was also famously reticent.







Analysis[edit]

Prisoners from the Front, 1866, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A Visit from the Old Mistress, 1876, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.


  • Description of artwork
  • Comparison with A Visit from the Old Mistress and Prisoners from the Front - maybe have a detail of the artwork as the main image and those two in a gallery. Intentional companion piece to A Visit from the Old Mistress, which is a sequel of sorts to Prisoners from the Front.
  • These pieces as emblematic of the conflicts of the war and reconstruction. The conflict in this particular piece is generational - the old woman who belongs to the past and the younger woman teaching the girls to read. Tension in empty space.
  • Sensitive and unstereotyped depiction - an "unprecedented" development.
  • More??




Reception and Provenance[edit]

Wood engraving of Sunday Morning in Virginia in Harper's Weekly, 22 May 1880. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
  • Was exhibited together with A Visit from the Old Mistress at Paris exposition (1878) and National Academy of Design (1880)
  • Mixed reception in Paris; more unanimously positive reception in the US
  • Critic statements
  • Repeated exhibitions however also meant that it wasn't selling, as at least one source notes.[5]
  • It did finally sell at the 1880 exhibition, to art collector William T. Evans; he would later recall that it was the very first piece he bought.




Citations[edit]

  1. ^ a b Wood, Peter; Dalton, Karen (1989). "Winslow Homer's images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction years". Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin. 49 (3). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: 3–4.
  2. ^ Calo, Mary Ann (1980). "Winslow Homer's Visits to Virginia during Reconstruction". American Art Journal. 12 (1). Kennedy Galleries Inc.: 4–27.
  3. ^ Calo 9
  4. ^ Conrads 129
  5. ^ Conrads 174

References[edit]

  • Cikovsky, Nikolai; Kelly, Franklin; Walsh, Judith C.; et al. (1995). Winslow Homer. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0894682172.
  • Conrads, Margaret C. (2001). Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691070997.
  • Gardner, Albert Ten Eyck (1961). Winslow Homer, American Artist: His World and Work. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. ISBN 0548453772.
  • Johns, Elizabeth (2003). Winslow Homer: The Nature of Observation. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520227255.
  • McElroy, Guy C. (1990). Facing History: The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940. San Francisco: Bedford Arts. ISBN 0938491393.
  • Wood, Peter H.; Dalton, Karen C. C. (1988). Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years. Austin: University of Texas Press. ISBN 0292790473.

External Links[edit]

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