Snap the Whip

A line of barefoot country boys races across a meadow at the edge of a schoolhouse yard, gripping hands as the last of them is snapped and swung by the momentum of the chain. Painted in 1872, at the height of Winslow Homer’s work as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, this image distilled his memories of rural Massachusetts boyhood into one of the most widely loved American paintings of the nineteenth century. Its plain, sunlit setting and sense of released energy made it an emblem of a lost pastoral youth, and it solidified Homer’s reputation as the foremost painter of the American scene.