User:Petropoxy (Lithoderm Proxy)/Sunday Morning in Virginia

Sunday Morning in Virginia is an 1877 oil painting by Winslow Homer depicting a Reconstruction era scene of African American children learning to read from the Bible. is an 1876 painting by American artist, Winslow Homer. It was one of several works that Homer created during a mid-1870s visit to Virginia, where he had served as a war correspondent during the Civil War.

Scholars have noted that the painting shares a compositional structure with A Visit from the Old Mistress, whose composition in turn is taken from Homer's earlier painting Prisoners from the Front, which depicts a group of captive Confederate soldiers defiantly regarding a Union officer.

It, along with Homer's other paintings of black southern life from this period, have been praised as an "invaluable record of an important segment of life in Virginia during the Reconstruction."

Background



 * Homer had long history of depicting African American subjects; career as a commercial illustrator
 * Had front-row seat to the core of the national conflict during the ACW; this was the crux of the change in his attitudes; particularly Near Andersonville
 * Development of his depictions of blacks over time, from genre to sympathy, tracked over the course of his career

Origin and development



 * Homer's reconstruction era trip (or trips?) to the South, and the speculative timeline of them
 * Which of the paintings from this period of his work are assumed to be mostly based on life sketches, and which are constructed from modeling sessions in the studio.
 * Anecdotes re. conflict from between Homer and his black models during VA trip. There are a bunch of other anecdotes about his time in the south that appear to be BS though, so keep that in mind.
 * Other, similar paintings of the same subject - Thomas Waterman Wood
 * This could be a little thin - maybe more here?

Homer made at least one, and perhaps several, trips to Virginia during the 1870s. The exact number and timing of these trips has long been a topic of scholarly speculation owing to lack of records. Homer was also famously reticent.

Analysis

 * Description of artwork
 * Comparison with A Visit from the Old Mistress and Prisoners from the Front - maybe have a detail of the artwork as the main image and those two in a gallery. Intentional companion piece to A Visit from the Old Mistress, which is a sequel of sorts to Prisoners from the Front.
 * These pieces as emblematic of the conflicts of the war and reconstruction. The conflict in this particular piece is generational - the old woman who belongs to the past and the younger woman teaching the girls to read. Tension in empty space.
 * Sensitive and unstereotyped depiction - an "unprecedented" development.
 * More??

Reception and Provenance



 * Was exhibited together with A Visit from the Old Mistress at Paris exposition (1878) and National Academy of Design (1880)
 * Mixed reception in Paris; more unanimously positive reception in the US
 * Critic statements
 * Repeated exhibitions however also meant that it wasn't selling, as at least one source notes.
 * It did finally sell at the 1880 exhibition, to art collector William T. Evans; he would later recall that it was the very first piece he bought.