Winslow Homer’s, “The Veteran in a New Field” is a powerful, post-Civil War reflection. “The Veteran in a New Field” is a hopeful work that acknowledges the dark days of the war years, yet looks ahead to a new season.
The Title
Our first clue that this oil painting is about more than a man bringing in the wheat harvest is the work’s title; A Veteran in a New Field. The title of the work clarifies the identity of the man pictured. We have a returning soldier who is out in a grain field. In the lower right corner of the work, we can see his Union jacket and a canteen. Both are partially buried under the newly cut grain.
This brings us to the second part of the painting’s title, a new field. The golden wheat is being harvested, not sown, so the field cannot be new. Instead, the lives of individuals, communities, and a nation, are new. Who and what we were before the war is dying and a new society is taking shape. There is both hope and despair in this transition. Despair over all that has been lost, and hope that the future will be full of life and lead to abundance.
The Timing of Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field
The Timing of Homer’s The Veteran in a New FieldOn April 9th, 1865 Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the Civil War.
On April 14th, 1865 Abraham Lincoln is assassinated. Another blow to an already fractured nation, this act of violence underscored the difficulties of the days ahead.
This work was completed that same year. While the active fighting of the war had ended, the weight of the conflict was just being realized. Few Americans were left untouched by the loss of life, and no one would escape the seismic changes to daily post-war life. Soldiers returning home bore physical, emotional, and spiritual scars, and the division of our nation had not yet begun to heal. While the battlefields had fallen silent, the discord and divisions that had led to the war continued to whisper their message of hate and distrust.
Painterly details of Homer’s “The Veteran in a New Field”
The work is painted in the realist style and has a strong horizontal feel as the field of grain dominates the canvas, covering nearly 2⁄3 of the space. The cut wheat in the foreground, standing wheat in the middle, and the cloudy sky at the top, create bands across the canvas that shape bold horizontal lines.
Horizontal lines generally convey a sense of peace and tranquility. Our minds connect horizontal lines to the horizon. The horizon line (where the earth meets the sky) is foundational to representative art, it grounds the picture in a solid, physical reality. The peace felt as we gaze out at the horizon resonates in our minds when we view art with a strong horizontal composition.
This work, with the horizon line so clearly delineated, unconsciously calls us to internalize feelings of stability. By contrast, the one vertical line in the work, the man working, disrupts both the painting, and our consciousness, calling us to question this tranquility.
The rich golden hue of the grain and the soft blue of the sky contrast with the nearly glowing white of the man’s shirt. The shirt and the strap moving across his back accentuate the work he is doing as he pulls the scythe through the standing wheat.
The colors of this work are what initially drew me to it. I was looking for something with an autumnal feel and grain ready to be harvested is the perfect embodiment of fall.
These classic fall colors are enhanced by Homer’s handling of diffused light as our figure works in the midday sun. As a painter who focused on outdoor scenes, it is unsurprising that he had mastered the effects of light.
Influence of Photography
Influence of PhotographyHomer’s composition was undoubtedly influenced by his exposure to the new technology of photography which had come into its own during the Civil War. As the viewer we feel we are standing directly behind the farmer watching him work. If we had a camera this could easily have been a photo that we quickly snapped.
While photography was still in its infancy, its influence was felt in a variety of ways. In particular, this work has been tied to a photograph that had become quite well-known in the years surrounding this work.
In 1863 Timothy O’Sullivan took this picture of soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. The photograph was formally titled, A Harvest of Death, and is one of the most famous images from the Civil War. The photograph was accompanied by a lengthy caption that ended with this statement:
“Such a picture conveys a useful moral: it shows the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry. Here are the dreadful details! Let them aid in preventing such another calamity falling upon the nation.”
The Soldier
As I’ve noted the figure in the work is the only vertical line. We are viewing the lone figure from the back which, in art, is a device called a Ruckenfigur. A Ruckenfigur is a person seen from behind in the foreground of an image.
This device has been employed since antiquity, but the figures were not generally the subject of the work. Instead they were meant to invite the viewer into the painting, we are meant to identify with the person who has their back to us. The German artist Casper Friedrich is now associated with the Ruckenfigur because he made the figure the subject of the work and not just one of many.
In our painting, having the figure with his back to us, allows us to identify with the man, returning from war, and trying to find his place in his old life. While not everyone postwar was making the same transition, everyone was having to adjust to a new reality. In essence, the figure embodies the demilitarization that has dominated American society for a number of years.
The lone figure also marks a departure, and perhaps turning point in Homer’s work. Up to this point his works have been far more complicated with multiple figures. The simplicity and the symbolic use of nature we will discuss in a minute, became key elements in Homer’s later works.
Interestingly, the jacket and canteen, seen in the bottom right corner, belong to the division that Homer traveled with as a war correspondent for Harper’s Weekly.
The Wheat In Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field
Placing our Veteran in a field of wheat is a deliberate choice by the artist, a choice laden with symbolic meaning.
Wheat is frequently viewed as a metaphor for life and death. The wheat seed must fall to the ground and die to give life to next year’s crop. Then once harvested the cycle continues. While it could be said that all seeds go through a similar cycle, wheat became so identified with this circle of life that during this time period, people were often buried holding a sheaf of wheat.
The veteran, harvesting the wheat that is as tall as he is, is a reminder of the war he is returning from. Surrounded by and likely causing death, our soldier has returned to the farm, picked up his scythe, and begun a harvest of a different sort.
Beyond this obvious symbolism, wheat is a northern crop and was used in patriotic images during the Civil War, much as cotton was emblematic of the South. Many of the battles happened in fields where crops were trampled under the boots of the fighting armies. Sadly, fields of fallen soldiers had become a part of America’s collective consciousness.
Note also that the wheat crop, perhaps representing the North’s victory and optimistically, is bountiful. This bountiful harvest has been interpreted as the redemptive future of the nation. In this image we have a reassurance that even amidst the pain and death life will go on, the land will heal, and over time, so will the soldiers and nation that has been torn apart.
Finally, the jacket and canteen that identified our soldier has not just been set down in the field, it has been nearly covered by the cut wheat. This new crop, new life, new society is overtaking and replacing the one that came before. Perhaps the most hopeful note in our painting.
The Scythe
When Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field was first seen by the public there was criticism. The source of most of the negative comments was that farmers no longer harvested wheat with a scythe, but with a cradle.
While a scythe is a single curved blade that could slice through patches of wheat, it created a messy fall of the stalks to be sorted and stacked after cutting, often losing some of the wheat kernels. Over time the cradle was invented and attached to the scythe. A cradle consists of several pieces of wood that catch the stalks which can then be piled in an orderly manner with all of the kernels going the same direction.
Interestingly, we can now see that initially, Homer painted his farmer with a cradle. The paint that he used has become slightly transparent over time allowing us to glimpse the change that was made. With this new insight, we know that Homer understood the process of harvesting wheat, and purposely chose to paint a scythe.
The popular reasoning for this choice is that a scythe evokes the image of the Grim Reaper thus tying the harvest of wheat and the harvest of war into a tighter circle. We are meant to read the painting on two levels, as individuals and as a nation.
Call to Peace
It’s been suggested that Homer was fascinated with the question of how the nation would move forward, could America absorb slaves into the fabric and culture of the nation and move into a better, more peaceful future?
For some, the work seemed to be referencing Isaiah 2:4 which calls for soldiers to “beat their swords into plowshares.” To leave behind the life of the soldier and embrace the life-giving vocation of a farmer.
Homer, War Correspondent for Harper’s Weekly
Homer, War Correspondent for Harper’s WeeklyHomer Winslow began his art career as a commercial printmaker and was employed as a graphic artist for Harper’s Weekly. In 1861 he was made a war correspondent and spent the war traveling with the Union Army and drawing scenes from the front that could be printed in Harper’s Weekly.
Before the war Harper’s Weekly was the most popular news source in the North and the South. However, early on in the war, Harper’s Weekly made it clear they sided with the North. Since almost all publishing was done out of New York, the North was able to document the war from their perspective.
Homer’s drawings captured the day-to-day life of soldiers, as well as major battles. Like the soldiers, he too had to return home and learn to live with all that he had seen, recorded, and lived through. Because of that, this work feels oddly personal to me.
In Conclusion
Although most of Homer Winslow’s work during the war was capturing actual events this work moves into the contemplative realm. It’s less about accurately picturing a farmer in the field and more about creating a meditation on where America now finds herself.
Through careful composition and imagery, Homer’s Veteran In a New Field has conveyed multiple narrative themes that the viewer is left to integrate into a cohesive whole as they move forward from this moment in time.
The nation was at a crossroads, where things would end up was unknown. A period of unparalleled darkness had engulfed the nation, and there appeared to be light ahead, but rebuilding was not going to be easy. The consequences of war are never easily dealt with.
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