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Winslow Homer Skirmish in theWilderness, 1864 Oil on canvas Harriet Russell Stanley Fund 1944.5

Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
Skirmish in the Wilderness, 1864

By the end of his life, Winslow Homer was considered America's greatest native painter, an opinion shared by many today. Born in Boston and raised in Cambridge, he was apprenticed to a lithographer in his hometown when he was nineteen. He finished his apprenticeship in 1857, and in 1859 he moved to New York, where he covered the Civil War for Harper's Weekly. During these years he began to develop his abilities as an oil painter and began exhibiting regularly in 1863.

Homer's experience as an illustrator provided the subjects of his first paintings—scenes of the Civil War and of fashionable life. After the war, he gained fame with Prisoners from the Front (1866; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a scene depicting the presentation of three captured Confederate soldiers to a Union officer. For the next decade or so Homer painted rural subjects, which ranged from the mountains to the seaside and represented both tourists and laborers. In 1875 the success of his oils and of his watercolors, his new medium, allowed him to cease working as an illustrator.

In 1881 Homer spent nearly a year in the small English fishing village of Cullercoats on the North Sea. Upon his return to the United States, he soon abandoned New York for the relative isolation of Prout's Neck, Maine. For the rest of his career, he concentrated on simple powerful landscapes and seascapes, ranging from Maine to the Adirondacks to the Caribbean, that contrast human heroism with the forces of nature. It is by these works that his contemporaries judged him one of America's greatest artists.

One of Homer's many Civil War scenes, Skirmish in the Wilderness is the artist's rendering of the Battle of the Wilderness, which was fought on May 5-6, 1864, near Spotsylvania, Virginia. One participant, Robert Stoddard Robertson, later recalled it as "the strangest and most undescribable battle in history. A battle which no man saw, and in which artillery was useless and hardly used at all. A battle fought in dense woods and tangled brake, where maneuvering was impossible, where the lines of battle were invisible to their commanders, and whose position could only be determined by the rattle and roll and flash of musketry, and where the enemy was also invisible."

This was the first battle between the forces of Robert E. Lee and the newly appointed lieutenant general in charge of all the Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant. Aware of Grant's superior troop numbers and greater artillery power, Lee forced the confrontation in a densely wooded section of land known as the Wilderness. Unable to coordinate troop actions and artillery support, the two armies devolved into pockets of vicious combat. Just one of the horrific elements of the engagement were the outbreak of brush fires, apparently sparked by the gunfire, that would trap and burn alive those, such as the wounded, who were unable to flee. By the end of the two days' action, over 25,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing.

Homer is reported to have said that Skirmish in the Wilderness grew from sketches he made while traveling with the Union army at the time of the battle. Whether or not this is true, he did have a personal involvement with one of the Union leaders of the battle. The officer striding in from the right, carrying a long cavalry sword and wearing a cap with a red dot (which could symbolize the red cloverleaf insignia of the Second Corps), may be Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow, a friend and distant cousin of the artist. Barlow commanded the First Division of the Second Corps, which at one point during the battle captured an entire division of Confederate soldiers and two generals.

For the most part, Homer's paintings and illustrations of the war were principally concerned with moments of quiet—men entertaining themselves in camp, sitting watchful around a campfire, lounging in the sunlight. In contrast, Skirmish in the Wilderness depicts armies joined in battle. Noise fills the scene; volleys of gunfire send thunderous roars between the rolling hills; and the cries of men and individual shots combine in a confusing wall of sound. Nowhere else in his paintings of the 1860s and 1870s does Homer depict such violence and chaos. Not until he turns to the sea as a subject in the 1880s does he again invoke a comparable level of unbridled aggression—and then, of course, it is nature, not man, that provides the sound and fury.

For further reading:

Marc Simpson, Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1988)
Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995)

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This essay has been condensed from a larger manuscript written by Bruce Robertson for the museum's collection catalogue.