After the War: Winslow Homer’s “The Veteran in a New Field”
Veterans’ Day Chapel Thursday, November 11, 2004
[This is the text of a chapel talk delivered at Westminster School in Simsbury, CT on Veterans’ Day, 2004. I thought it appropriate to share with a wider audience today. The admittedly incomplete citations are meant as references for my students; they are not comprehensive. Mea culpa.]
Good morning.
Today is Veterans’ Day, formerly known as Armistice Day, and in Canada and much of Europe as Remembrance Day. Originally, Veterans’ Day was the celebration of the end of the First World War – the Great War, the “war to end all wars” – which unhinged European civilization in 1914 and staggered to a close in ashes and uncertainty on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. Memorial Day, celebrated in May, honors America’s war dead, those who gave their country, in Lincoln’s eternal phrase, the “last full measure of devotion.” Today we honor all American veterans. Today we remember the living and the peace they have given us: those, who in times of national crisis and peril, willingly put aside their own lives, concerns and families in favor of the common good, and, having “done their part,” returned to private life. You will hear the school’s chapel bells ring at 11:00 am this morning in remembrance of America’s veterans; please observe a minute of silence at that time and reflect upon their service. This year, Veterans’ Day has particular resonance: as we sit here now, and as the school’s bell tolls, American troops and their allies are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan; more than in other years, perhaps, it is worth remembering the words of the poet: “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
At the core of any republic, and particularly one dedicated to the liberty of the people, is the notion of civic virtue. Simply put, the virtue of the people – their rationalism, basic goodness, and willingness to set aside selfish concerns in preference to the common good – is elemental. With it, freedom reigns. The United States has always been able to draw on its deep well of civic virtue. It is a part of our secular faith as a nation that civic virtue will preserve the republic. This virtue comes in many forms, but there is no higher example than that of America’s veterans.
One of the more important rituals of any nation is the ritual of remembrance. These rituals tell us who we are and where we come from; they help to point us in the direction in which we need to go. Art has always figured prominently in the national liturgy of remembrance. There are three kinds of memorial art. First, art celebrates our victories - the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington is a well-known example of celebratory memorial art. Second, and more solemnly, art remembers our war dead - it remembers those who have given their lives for us - one thinks, in this way, of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial or the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor in this case. But art as remembrance has an additional purpose. It reminds us on a personal and individual level of the civic virtue and sacrifice of the numberless, nameless, and faceless veterans who have served this country in times of war, survived, and come home. They are undoubtedly changed by their experience. Who can tell what toll has been exacted from the few by the many in the nation’s hour of need? The time with family lost, the physical, psychological and emotional price paid, the lives altered, the courses of personal histories changed? Thus we have a third category of memorial art: art that celebrates the living veterans of America’s wars.
On this day and with this in mind, I thought it appropriate to share with you my own thinking about a particular work of art, a painting that has interested me for many years and that I have shared with some of you in my classes, and that continues to evolve.
On the south wall of a small room in the American wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art hangs a Civil War painting completed in 1865 and first publicly displayed later that year. It is small for a painting dealing with an historical subject, roughly two feet by three, certainly smaller than the grand canvases of John Trumbull or of Emanuel Leutze’s well-known “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” It is an oil on canvas, which was not the medium settled upon by the author later in life and used in most of his perhaps better-remembered works. It is compositionally simple: a single figure, his back to the viewer, stands with scythe poised as he works his way through a rich wheat field, the dark of the ground beneath his feet, the brilliant blue of the sky above him. There are few details beyond the Union Army coat and canteen laying on the ground at the man’s feet. It is Homer’s elegiac “The Veteran in a New Field,” painted early in the artist’s career and at the end of the American Civil War, capturing both the sorrow and the hopefulness of that moment. It is also, perhaps, one of the first great wholly American history paintings.
The painting has been much examined by art critics and art historians: Nicolai Cikovsky’s article “A Harvest of Death: The Veteran in a New Field” is the single best comprehensive critical article on the painting. His Winslow Homer, his and Franklin Kelly’s definitive Winslow Homer and editor Marc Simpson’s Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War are but three more fine sources of commentary on Homer’s work and his Civil War paintings particularly.1 Cikovsky is the preeminent Homer scholar, and my talk today relies heavily on his work. Of the painting, Cikovsky writes, “‘The Veteran in a New Field’ is one of Homer’s greatest and most moving works . . . despite it’s succinctness, no painting – not even Homer’s ‘Prisoners from the Front,’ which is verbose by comparison – spoke of the issues, events, and feelings at the end of the Civil War as fully, as memorably, and as articulately as this one.”2
While acknowledging that there is little evidence to suggest that Homer was a “prophet or theoretician of democracy” such as [Walt] Whitman, Cikovsky clearly and carefully identifies and analyzes the political symbolism and importance of the painting, in some ways seeing it as a democratic painting, its subject knowingly a proof of democratic ideals and in that way evidence of Homer’s belief in them, it may, perhaps, give substance to the possibility that Homer somehow shared a democratic faith like Whitman’s, and, what is more, an ambition like Whitman’s to make a democratic art.3
But Cikovsky’s and others, while accepting the painting as “democratic art,” have missed the remarkable parallels between Homer’s great work and another great work “democratic art” that uniquely captured the meaning and importance of the Civil War: Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” The parallels are such that it may even be suggested that Homer created with canvas and oil what Lincoln created with paper and ink. “The Veteran in the New Field” and the “Gettysburg Address” stand together as “democratic art,” wonderfully descriptive of Lincoln’s leadership during the war and to his transformation of the war’s meaning to embrace the “new birth of freedom” of the Address. Where earlier American artists had either looked to Europe as Trumbull and Leutze did or to the American wilderness as the Hudson River School did for compositional and topical inspiration, Homer drew on the Jeffersonian and classical ideal of the citizen-soldier and the new political rhetoric of American democracy voiced by Abraham Lincoln. In doing so, he created a uniquely American history painting.
Winslow Homer’s “The Veteran in a New Field” is a compellingly simple and yet a remarkably complex work of art. Compositionally, it is divided into three simple parts: the unlimited blue of the sky, the golden yellow of the wheat, and the rich brown of the ground. More can be said of this three-fold division in light of the structure of the Address, as will be discussed below. At the center of the work is a single man cutting a field of wheat with a scythe. Upon closer examination, a discarded army field coat and canteen can seen in the lower right hand corner: they identify the man as a recently-demobilized Union Army veteran, and specifically a veteran of the First Division, II Corps (the red, three-leaf trefoil, or cloverleaf, on the canteen), a part of the Army of the Potomac that fought in most of the great battles of the Eastern theater of the Civil War: Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, and the long great siege that ended at Appomattox. Homer traveled during the early years of the war with 61st New York Volunteer Infantry as a sketch-artist and war journalist for Harper’s; the 61st was attached to the First Division, and the trefoil, which also appears in his “Prisoners from the Front” (1866), is a nod to his old companions.
What matters, too – as is the case in the Address – is what’s missing from the painting. A single man, faceless and unidentifiable – he is “everyman” – is placed amidst a bounty of wheat and silhouetted against a cloudless sky. The richness of the earth is spread beneath his feet. The lighting and setting suggest morning; the veteran is returned from war and is just beginning the work before him. With the morning sun on his back, it seems that Homer has his veteran – and thus the viewer - facing west, into the great future and possibility of America after the Civil War. The darkness at the man’s feet is sharply contrasted with the rich yellow of the wheat and even more so with the bright blue sky at the top of the painting. Beneath this somewhat simple composition, however, lies a powerful symbolism celebrating the republican spirit of the United States and the end of the Civil War.
There is great power in art to alter and improve upon reality in order to provide meaning and symbolic weight to the subject. Since the invention of the camera before the war and the birth of photography as an art form and as a way of conveying information to the viewer, painters in the late 19th century increasingly embraced representational, symbolic, and impressionistic methods to deliver their message – a way of creating art that no camera could not duplicate. Sketch artists such as Homer during the Civil War faced competition from the Matthew Brady’s and Alexander Gardner’s of the world; Brady’s horrific images of Antietam, displayed in his New York studio window for all to see, laid bare the brutality of war. No sketch or painting could match the realism of the camera. Serious artists – and Homer wanted to be a serious artist even though he made his living selling sketches to Harper’s Magazine – were forced to employ greater skill, more subtlety, and greater meaning in their art if it was to continue to attract public attention.
Symbolism is vital in Homer’s work, and “The Veteran” is no exception. It is, as Cikovsky writes, “Homer’s most political painting.”4 Symbolism, and particularly political symbolism, in the painting was central to its creation, so much so that Homer returned to the finished painting to make two critical changes. In doing so, “Homer deliberately undid what he knew to be literally - or merely - true in favor of a larger meaning . . .”5 The first change was simple enough: Homer painted over tree branches that intruded into the sky-blue top of the painting and that are clearly evident in early studies and wood engravings of the work.6 Undoubtedly, this “purified” the image and laid bare its visual power. The second was more subtle but central to the intent of the painting. As critics were quick to argue in 1865, Homer incorrectly chose a scythe as the tool of harvesting wheat; by 1865, the grain cradle was by far the tool of choice. He was also criticized at the time for painting the wheat too high – “[a]nd such grain!” remarked one contemporary critic.7 The painting itself has revealed (after cleaning and time) that Homer was not mistaken: he had painted the grain cradle originally, but later chose to paint over the cradle and replace it with a scythe. Homer is clearly evoking the image of Death the Reaper in this painting. The height of the wheat reinforces this image by mirroring the height of the man: this veteran, so recently a reaper of men, has put aside the tools of war and is redeemed as a reaper of wheat. We are reminded, too, of the Biblical text of Isaiah 2:4, “. . . and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” A more ‘literally true’ painting, with the veteran wielding a grain cradle and cutting wheat waist high, would not have permitted this powerful symbolism.
Strengthening this symbolism is the field itself. In addition to being symbols of peace and plenty, sheaves of wheat were often used as ornaments in 19th century American funerals. Thus we are reminded of two things. On the one hand the great bounty of America’s future for those who survived the war, but also the grim air of death that hangs about the veteran and the country. Peace and plenty is tempered with sorrow and responsibility. The title of the work is a trigger of this symbolism: the veteran’s “new field” is a powerful reminder of the “old fields,” the battlefields of the war itself: Homer’s viewers would have been well aware that some of the bloodiest fighting of the war had taken place in the Corn Field of Antietam, the Peach Orchard and Wheat Field of Gettysburg, and other such terrible places.
Further, there is symbolism in the painting that is more alien to our eyes and ears, dimmed by the passage of time, but one that modern art critics and Homer scholars identify as the central political meaning of the painting. In the summer of 1865, the issue of the peaceful mustering-out of the large volunteer army was a pressing one. The public was concerned that the reintroduction to society of such a substantial number of men would be disruptive both economically and socially. Many contemporary commentators touched on the image of the great Roman hero Cincinnatus, a popular historical figure in 19th century republican America, to quiet these concerns.8 In addition to thus conjuring up the mythic Roman savior of the republic, they were also conjuring the equally mythic and more well-known “American Cincinnatus”: George Washington. As the Roman legend goes, the great general Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus left his farm in the 5th century B.C. to assume the dictatorship of Rome. He was called by the republic to lead a consular army against Rome’s enemies, and, having won peace in but a single day, relinquished power and returned to his home. Washington, all Americans well knew, had also served his country long and well, refused first a crown and later a third term, and retired to the life of a gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon. When disbandment proceeded without difficulty in the summer and fall of 1865, it was viewed as a symbol of the strength of the republic. Walt Whitman remarked, “the peaceful and harmonious disbanding of the armies in the summer of 1865 [was one of the] immortal proofs of democracy, unequall’d in all the history of the past.”9 Homer’s veteran evokes Cincinnatus, the republican farmer, as it does the tradition of the American citizen-soldier stretching back to Lexington and Concord. We are reminded, too, of the yeoman farmer of Jefferson’s agrarian republic. Both possess in great measure the civic virtue that is the soul of citizenship in a great republic. Cincinnatus, on the one hand, selfless and true; Jefferson’s yeoman on the other, self-sufficient and possessing goodness of heart and directness of purpose. We are in this way comforted by Homer’s veteran, because like Cincinnatus and Washington, he can be called upon to fight and die for the nation and the republic.
In these ways “The Veteran in a New Field” is a profoundly hopeful painting – it recognizes the tragedy of the war, and yet celebrates what has been saved and directs us to the future. But it is mournful as well. The war exacted a terrible cost, as over 700,000 men gave their lives until “every drop of blood drawn with the lash was repaid with one drawn by the sword.” For Homer and the Union, that price included the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and Homer’s mourning and the mourning of the nation is evident in the painting. Homer’s veteran is not triumphant. For all its hopefulness, there is a certain sadness here – the heaviness of the war weighs on the veteran’s shoulders, but not so much that he cannot bear the burden. He has been changed by the war, but he has not been consumed by it. He is bowed, but not beaten. It is, in the words of one scholar, a moving “elegy on the death of Lincoln.”10
By itself, “The Veteran in a New Field” is a powerful painting, a somber and heroic memorial to Abraham Lincoln and the men of the Civil War, melancholy and hopeful at once. But the painting is more than that, and an examination of the painting in concert with the stylistic construction of the Gettysburg Address and the meaning of Lincoln's words reveals remarkable parallels that lead to the conclusion that Homer captured, intentionally or not, the meaning of the Address on canvas. As with the painting alone, much has been written about the meaning and importance of the Gettysburg Address, and no work is better than Gary Wills’s wonderful Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. The Address is without question Lincoln’s purest evocation of the meaning of the war and of the American experiment – and a work of literary art in its own right.
Homer was a journalist during the war, and travelled with the Army of the Potomac, particularly in 1861 and 1862, where he watched and learned a great deal about army life. And while he did not see, perhaps, actual combat, he was close to many soldiers from rankmen to his friend General Francis Channing Barlow (who appears in “Prisoners from the Front”). After that, however, he spent most of his time in New York working during the second half of the war.11 Homer was certainly aware of the Address, as he was undoubtedly aware of Lincoln’s other important war speeches. There is a remarkable and startling parallel between the structure of the Address and structure of the painting. This parallel adds to the symbolic power of the painting, and places our veteran squarely at the heart of Lincoln’s interpretation of the war.
The Gettysburg Address is purposefully divided into three parts, corresponding to its three paragraphs. First is the past, “Four score and seven . . . ,” in which Lincoln reminds us of the origins of the nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Second is the present, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war . . . ,” as Lincoln establishes the war as a great challenge to that ideal. And finally, there is the future, “ . . . it is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . . ,” in which Lincoln gives new meaning to the war beyond preservation of the Union to include a renewed dedication to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. The number three is a recurring theme in the Address: “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow . . .” and “government of the people, by the people, for the people . . .” The count of three, one-two-three, is the very rhythm and heartbeat of the Address.
The painting, too, is divided into the three from the dark bottom third of the soil and cut wheat through the middle third of the veteran and the wheat field, and the top third of the blue sky. But this is not simply a compositional device. The three-fold division mirrors in content and tone the divisions of the Address. The foreground, with it’s dark brown hues and the chaos of cut wheat and the discarded coat and canteen, is the past, reminding us of the war recently ended. It is almost a battlefield itself, reminiscent of the widely-viewed photographs of Civil War battlefields, with bodies and debris cast about by the violence of war. In the middle present is the veteran himself, with the bright sun on his white-shirted back and the golden field of wheat before him, his scythe poised. Significantly, the scythe is in the middle of its cut, having been swung before the veteran on the first pass, and is ready for the backstroke necessary to begin the next cutting swing. The middle passage is pregnant with action, poised before the future as Lincoln was in November 1863 and as Homer’s veteran’s scythe is in the painting. This dramatic tension was an oft-used device in Homer’s work.12 Finally, in the top third, the dramatic open space of the sky, bright and hopeful, above the veteran’s head is the future.
Significant meaning in the Address is conveyed by what is not, in fact, it at all. At the height of the Civil War and on the site of the greatest Union victory of that war, Lincoln chose not to refer to North or South, Union or Confederate, victory or defeat. Instead, he spoke to all Americans about the future of the republic, the “unfinished work,” the “great task,” the “cause” of the Address. Similarly, at war’s end, Homer’s veteran is, though a Union man, largely unidentifiable – an archetypal Civil War veteran. He has his own “great work” before him in the field of wheat stretching to the horizon. He is facing west, to America’s future, vibrant and expectant in the fertile productivity of America.
With these parallels in mind, read the Address and look at the painting:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Homer’s veteran is so dedicated . . . in this republican farmer is the new American Cincinnatus, the Jeffersonian ideal made real: it is with his sweat and with his blood that “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been preserved and will flourish. He has fought the good fight, and he is home now, bowed but not broken by his sacrifice, the trappings of war discarded, scythe in hand, in a new field. It is Homer’s veteran who has kept alive Daniel Webster’s refrain of “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable” and continues Jonathan Winthrop’s “city upon a hill.” Shelby Foote, the Civil War historian, once remarked that you cannot understand American history without understanding the Civil War; I submit you cannot understand the Civil War unless you understand this painting.
In this way, Homer’s “The Veteran in a New Field” emerges as one of the most moving tributes to America’s veterans – it transcends space and time to speak to us all about the necessity of sacrifice and the importance of civic virtue. Like the Arizona resting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor or the austere Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, its starkness and conscious avoidance of artistic grandiloquence forces us to remember war for the national tragedy and triumph that it is, and for the legacy it bequeaths us. Great victories do not come without great sacrifice, or great cost, nor do they come free of responsibility. It is not difficult to imagine Homer’s veteran at any one of a hundred American battlefields: at Lexington, at New Orleans, at Fredericksburg, in the Argonne Forest, aboard the Yorktown, at Inchon, at Hue, or in Baghdad today. Homer’s veteran reminds us, in his strength, of the virtue of those who have served America and of our own responsibilities as Americans.
Veterans’ Day reminds us, yes, of the sacrifices of America’s veterans, and we honor them today in Homer’s painting. But the day reminds us, too, that we are similarly charged with displaying the kind of civic virtue without which no republic can survive. Homer’s “The Veteran in a New Field” reminds us of what it means to be an American and to give of oneself for the greater good. His moving work of art and remembrance binds us to his veteran. Like Lincoln, Homer is reminding us of our common past and common future; and reminds us, too, of the debt owed to this and all veterans. This veteran, in this field, gives life to the plea to all Americans that “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, [may] yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”13
Thank you.
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers used the painting on their 1985 album, “Southern Accents.” Together with the eponymous title song, there is a song called “Rebels” on the album.
Cikovsky, “A Harvest of Death,” 83. Nicolai Cikovsky, "A Harvest of Death: The Veteran in a New Field," in Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, ed. Marc Simpson (San Francisco: Bedford Arts for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1988), 82-101.
Cikovsky, “A Harvest of Death,” 94.
Cikovsky, Winslow Homer, 23. Cikovsky, Winslow Homer (New York: Rizzoli Art Classics, 1992).
Cikovsky and Kelly, 24-5. Cikovsky and Franklin Kelly Winslow Homer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
Cikovsky and Kelly, 25 and Simpson, et. al., 218 and 219. Marc Simpson, Nicolai Cikovsky, and Lucretia Hoover, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1988).
Russell Sturgis, quoted in Rash, “A Note,” 88. Nancy Rash, “A Note on Winslow Homer's "Veteran in a New Field" and Union Victory,” American Art , Summer, 1995, Vol. 9, No. 2 (The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum), 88-93.
See especially Cikovsky, Winslow Homer, 24-25.
Quoted in Cikovsky and Kelly, 25-6.
Cikovsky and Kelly, 26 and Cikovsky, 27.
Simpson, et. al., 20.
Wilson, 25. Christopher Kent Wilson, “Winslow Homer's "The Veteran in a New Field": A Study of the Harvest Metaphor and Popular Culture,” The American Art Journal, Autumn, 1985, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Kennedy Galleries, Inc.), 2-27.
Lincoln, “First Inaugural.”