Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Prisoners from the Front, 1866

	Source :	Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
	Type and size :	Oil on canvas; 24 x 38 in. (61.0 x 96.5 cm)
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	Commentary :	The material that Homer collected as an artist-correspondent during the Civil War provided the subjects for his first oil paintings. In 1866, one year after the war ended and four years after he reputedly began to paint in oil, Homer completed this picture, a work that established his reputation. It represents an actual scene from the war in which a Union officer, Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow (1834-1896) captured several Confederate officers on June 21, 1864. The background depicts the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia. Infrared photography and numerous studies indicate that the painting underwent many changes in the course of completion. This history painting depicts Union General Francis Channing Barlow receiving three Confederate Prisoners of war at the battle of Spotsylvania in 1864. Homer had worked for the magazine Harper`s Weekly as an illustrator during the war, and he met with Barlow personally at the front. While referring to an actual event, Homer chose a generic title. He also reflected prevailing Northern attitudes about the rebellion by showing a dashing Union officer facing three stereotypical Southern characters. Eugene Benson, writing in the New York Evening Post, offered this analysis: "On one side the hard, firm-faced New England man, without bluster, and with the dignity of a life animated by principle, confronting the audacious, reckless, impudent young Virginian. . .; next to him the poor, bewildered old man, . . . scarcely able to realize the new order of things about to sweep away the associations of his life; back of him the `poor white,` stupid, stolid, helpless, yielding to the magnetism of superior natures and incapable of resisting authority" (qtd. in Cikovsky and Kelly 26-27). Homer conveys at once the effectiveness of the democratic man in General Barlow, and the various character flaws that Northerners believed issued from Southern aristocratic society and gave rise to the rebellion itself. Three decades later Stephen Crane would describe a similar scene of Confederate prisoners, but with a different emphasis.