"Near Andersonville": Winslow Homer's Civil War (review)

In early October 2009, Peter H. Wood delivered three related lectures in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that are the basis of his new book, "Near Andersonville": Winslow Homer's Civil War. His engaging presentations, part of the Nathan I. Huggins Lecture Series at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, may be viewed online (http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/) and are worth watching. Wood, a professor emeritus of history at Duke University, is as strong at the podium as he is on the page.

In the book as well as in the lecture hall, Wood patiently introduces one of Winslow Homer's least-known Civil War-era paintings, an enigmatic portrayal of an African American woman standing in the shadowy doorway of a Georgia cabin. From the threshold, she watches Confederate troops march a column of Union prisoners to an uncertain fate, a segment of which we also see at the upper left side of the composition. Homer completed the work in 1865 or early 1866 (the canvas bears both dates) and titled it Near Andersonville.

In Wood's first chapter (and lecture), he describes the 1960 discovery of Near Andersonville, "the picture in the attic," as he calls it, after the death of Horace Kellogg Corbin of Llewellyn Park, New Jersey. Corbin's five grown children slowly become intrigued by the work, even with its useful title and attribution long since lost. Wood blends fascinating family history with art-market machinations and a dose of institutional indifference (once the children donate the painting to the Newark Museum in 1966) in telling the story of the work's authentication and reentry into Winslow Homer's oeuvre. The rediscovery of the painting's proper title would come many years later. Some parts of this section read like a good episode of Antiques Roadshow, not necessarily to the book's benefit. But with tenacious research typical of Wood's best work, he unearths the identity of Near Andersonville's first owner, Sarah Louise Kellogg, an extraordinary but nearly forgotten Corbin ancestor, who died just weeks after acquiring the work. How or why the canvas came into her possession, we do not know.

In chapter 2 (and in the second lecture), entitled "Behind Enemy Lines," Wood recounts the horrors of the infamous Confederate prison in southwest Georgia known as Andersonville. The story of the camp's squalid conditions, starvation rations, and the thousands of Union soldiers who died there has been retold many times. But Wood also teases out a less well-remembered chapter in the prison's history: Union major general George Stoneman's ill-advised cavalry ride to liberate Andersonville in late July 1864. In the wake of his failed raid, Stoneman would become the Union army's highest-ranking prisoner of war. Confederate forces captured some six hundred of his men near Macon, Georgia, and their march of a different kind to Andersonville is the scene glimpsed in the background of Homer's painting.

Wood completes his discussion of Near Andersonville, both in the book and in his third lecture, with a close analysis of "the woman in the sunlight." Here, Wood is at his very best, isolating nearly every element in the composition and offering some sense of its deeper symbolic meaning and reinforcement of the whole. Homer's willingness to relate to his black subject, his empathy and effort to understand and express her point of view, is what separated him from other artists of his age and certainly from popular illustrators, trained on stereotypes and prejudiced perceptions. To Wood, one of Homer's greatest gifts was his sensitivity to those held powerless by circumstances beyond their control. That compassionate perspective, which served the artist for the remainder of his career, may have found its first meaningful expression in Near Andersonville.

Wood arrived in Cambridge with a well-prepared (manu)script. Watching him on screen, it is possible at times to follow along verbatim in...