Nast and Homer:
War and other subject matter
The other day I was scratching at an amiable website called Son of the South, which has a lot of interesting mementoes from the American Civil War, including many of the pages from the wartime issues of Harper’s Weekly, the older brother of Harper’s Bazaar, a generously illustrated broadsheet that billed itself as “A Journal of Civilization”, at six cents per copy.
The website has ample reading on all of the Confederate and Union generals, plus Civil War medicine, native Americans, slavery, the “Mexican War” and the founding of Texas. Two things struck me in particular, one being that Harper’s Weekly, based in remote New York City, found a lot of other things to take notice of besides the war going on further south, as the above picnic scene in Central Park from August 1864 suggests. A typical weekend gathering, evidently.
The other surprise was that, out on the battlefields (or at least close enough to hear the screams), Matthew Brady had the company of a couple of notable artists, Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast. Both appear to have been stuck in camp most of the time, though there are some compelling long views of sieges.
Hailing from Boston and self-taught, Homer (1836-1910) had by the time the war began already earned a national reputation as an illustrator and opened his own studio in New York to launch his career as a painter of natural scenery.
But it was only when he moved to France in 1867 that his genius blossomed among the impressionists, and in watercolour at that. He travelled around the continent before coming to rest in England in 1882, and over the next two years his boyhood fascination with the sea was rediscovered.
On his return to the US he settled in Prout’s Neck, Maine, and began painting the seascapes for which he is most famous. He died there at age 74.
Below is the engraving from a May 1862 edition of Harper’s based on Homer’s sketch of Confederate soldiers wielding lanterns near Yorktown.
Homer’s “Snap the Whip” See the rest.
