Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War (review)

Peter Wood’s short book Near Andersonville, based on his Nathan I. Huggins lectures delivered at Harvard in 2009, is a fascinating, accessible account of an exceptional picture by Winslow Homer painted in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Anyone who has had the pleasure of reading Wood’s previous scholarship on Homer, including his 1988 exhibition catalog coauthored with Karen Dalton, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (University of Texas Press, 1998) will enjoy his new book for its generous, sympathetic approach to Homer’s imagery of African Americans engaged in a momentous period of historical transformation.

In the main, Homer’s paintings of African Americans are unusually serious and thoughtful images, especially so for their time. They tend to be quiet, stilled images, unlike his more anecdotal illustrations for Harper’s Weekly or the often cheery pictures of lower-class life known then as genre painting. Even by Homer’s standards, though, Near Andersonville stands out. Centered in the canvas is a full-length figure of an African American woman standing in the sunlight against the deep shadow of a doorway. She turns her head and gazes to her right, pointing toward a small vignette visible in the upper left corner of the canvas: a scene of Confederate soldiers with rifles on their shoulders marching a group of Union prisoners under a Confederate flag. She is clearly a working woman, dressed in a white apron and a red, white, and blue headscarf. She stands on a threshold between house and yard, between dark and light, herself imprisoned by walls and fence. With her erect posture and her somber face, she seems to contemplate the shared plight of her people and the captured Union soldiers, both under the yoke of the Confederacy.

For almost a century, as Wood relates in a page-turning account of the picture’s history, Near Andersonville was in a private collection and unknown even to Homer scholars. When it surfaced in the 1960s in the collection of a wealthy New Jersey family, its title was still unknown. Donated to the Newark Art Museum in 1966, the picture acquired the title At the Cabin Door. Not until the late 1980s did museum curators discover an 1866 newspaper announcement of an art auction in New York that described the picture and gave the title Near Andersonville, henceforth linking the picture to the notorious prisoner of war camp operated by Confederate authorities in Georgia. Beyond this single newspaper citation, we have very little direct historical evidence to document the painting. Wood does an excellent job of ferreting out circumstantial evidence to establish the probable first owner of the picture, a white abolitionist named Sarah Louisa Kellogg who traveled to Port Royal, South Carolina, during the war to teach freed slaves. She may have crossed paths there with Winslow Homer’s brother Arthur who was in the U.S. navy.

Homer signed and dated the picture 1865. He may well have been inspired by the trial of Henry Wirz, the Confederate commander of Andersonville prison, which was front-page-headline material for months until Wirz’s execution in November 1865. Wood tries to connect the picture specifically to events in 1864, including the summertime capture of Stoneman’s raiders, but here his use of circumstantial evidence is less convincing. Nothing in the picture itself suggests a link to a particular event, and indeed the picture seems to have a slower, more unfolding temporality.

The rest of Wood’s book is devoted to pictorial interpretation. With great curiosity and perceptiveness, he scours almost every inch of the canvas—the gourds resting on the fence and windowsill, the planks at her feet, the folds in her apron, and so on. Occasionally his interpretation of the picture’s visual elements fails to be entirely persuasive. For example, the connection of the gourds to escaping slaves is far from certain, since it is based on...