The Veteran in a New Field

Painted in the summer of 1865, in the months immediately after the end of the American Civil War, this picture shows a Union soldier who has shed his uniform to reap a field of wheat, his coat and scythe lying at his side. Winslow Homer, who had spent part of the war sketching for Harper’s Weekly, invested the return to peacetime farming with a depth of feeling that made the canvas an enduring national icon. Widely celebrated as one of the great images of how a nation went back to work, it is among Homer’s most famous early oils.