Winslow Homer American, 1836-1910

Between the years 1875-1885, Winslow Homer created monochrome drawings as standalone objects worthy of sale as seen in The Reaper (1879). The well-known painting that inspired the present drawing, The Veteran in a New Field (1865; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), has been identified as Homer’s “earliest symbolic work” and shows the farmer returning to work after the Civil War has ended [1]. The painting's implied symbolism suggests that the new field is for wheat and not bloodshed and where the veteran carries a scythe instead of a weapon. Among the multiple readings of The Veteran in a New Field painting include an elegy to Abraham Lincoln, associations with the Grim Reaper, and hope for renewal in the harvest. Homer draws from this powerful imagery in reprising the solitary reaper figure in this small drawing. In this version, the simplified background allows focus on the farmer who carries his tool under his arm as he returns home at the end of day. Homer here shows the farmer as a boy, alluding to the generation of children who have grown up during the Civil War and have replaced the veterans in the field. The masterful composition is grounded by the diagonal from the top of the figure’s hat to his back heel and also employs opaque white, a hallmark of Homer’s 1870s drawings that he continued to use in the following decades. He executed a related watercolor in the same year called The Reaper in His Field (Private collection) using this drawing as a model [2].

[1] Nicolai Cikovsky et al., Winslow Homer (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995), p. 25; as quoted in Nancy Rash, “A Note on Winslow Homer’s Veteran in a New Field and Union Victory” (American Art, Summer 1995), p. 88