Two paintings are set where Homer could never have gone, behind enemy lines. (The imaginative prerogatives of painting over photography are also many.) “Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg,” of 1864, shows a Confederate soldier who can endure no longer. Leaping wildly atop fortifications meant as shelter, he stands exposed against the open sky, shouting tauntingly in the direction of massed Yankee forces. A couple of distant puffs of gun smoke suggest the ending to this act of suicidal insanity—or insane bravery, perhaps, for there is something heroic in this awful figure, so very different from the sharpshooter, whose unremitting eye was reported to drive troops to nervous collapse.
The problematic figure here is not the quixotic Rebel, though, toward whom Homer extends a strained compassion, but a Black banjo player huddled behind the fortifications, strumming away, his face a minstrel caricature of big pink lips and rolling eyes. (Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, in the show’s catalogue, notes that Homer would likely have used the same burnt cork and lampblack that minstrel players used to blacken their faces.) This figure presses the question: How far did Homer’s compassion extend in these years?
In the spontaneous act of drawing, his eye was perfectly honest, sketching Black men in the Union Army—a mule-team driver, men riding a baggage train—with individuality and dignity. Even in the more public sphere of magazine illustration, Black men—from Douglass to a figure seated on what looks to be a powder keg, illustrating “Dixie”—are few but untouched by minstrelsy. Questions have been raised about a lithograph called “Our Jolly Cook”: Is the frantically dancing Black man performing for his own racially clichéd pleasure or to meet the demands of an audience of grim-faced white soldiers? Homer brought Black soldiers to the fore in two substantive paintings, “The Bright Side” and “Army Boots,” which, while they don’t trade in physical stereotypes, show the men at rest, all but one lying down—or, as Shaw and others see it, purveying “tropes of Black indolence.” It seems fair to say that the painter who would end up “breaking artistic stereotypes about the Negro,” in the words of Alain Locke, a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and a scholar of African American art, was still finding his way. His early depictions of Black men were variable. Whether owing to some personal acquaintance, however, or to the absence of fear, or to simple empathy, he never wavered in the dignity he accorded Black women.
It is doubtful whether Homer was ever near the Confederate prison known as Andersonville, in southwestern Georgia. But, within months of the war’s end, the artist, like everyone in the North who could read a newspaper, knew about the brutal conditions that ultimately resulted in the death there of thirteen thousand captured Union soldiers. The camp’s commander was put on very public trial, and was hanged. Homer made no attempt to show the prison itself. Yet his response was as large in intellectual scope and feeling as it is visually restrained and indirect. “Near Andersonville,” completed in 1866, shows a young Black woman, modestly but neatly dressed and wearing a white apron, standing in the doorway of a rough-hewn dwelling, looking to the side, deep in thought. Only at the edge of the painting do we see the soldiers she has seen already, captive Yankees being led off by Rebel forces, the triumphant Confederate flag flying overhead.
