Croquet Scene

Three women in crisp summer dresses and a man in a dark coat gather round the wicket in a sun-bright clearing, the red and dwarf-gold of their costumes ringing against the greens of the lawn. Croquet Scene, painted by the young Winslow Homer in 1866, is the most famous of the group of small pictures with which he introduced modern American life to oil painting, in the very years he was emerging from Civil War illustration; Homer caught the game at a moment of poised stillness — the ball at rest, the mallets lifted, the players intent — and the canvas is at once a study of leisure in the young republic and a demonstration of the rigour he would bring to his great later seascapes. The broad lighting and the honest faces mark the transition between his graphic work and his full maturity as a painter. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.