079

  • The Army of the Potomac—A Sharpshooter on Picket Duty

  • 1862
  • Winslow Homer (American 1836-1910)
  • Magazine wood engraving, from November 15, 1862 Harper's Weekly
  • 23.3 x 34.9 cm., 9-1/8 x 13-3/4" image
  • Gift of Mr. and Mrs. George and Pat Olson, Augustana College Art Collection, 1999.1

Essay by Scott Irelan, Former Assistant Professor of Theatre

As a correspondent-artist for Harper's Weekly, Winslow Homer recorded the lives and adventures of Northern soldiers in camp, on reconnaissance, in battle, and in this case, on sniper duty. While certain images served to valorize wartime activities, many also pointed to the horrors of modern warfare with its distanced, impersonal killing fostered by rifled muskets, telescopic sights and flesh-shredding bolts (Hess 197-217). This tension can be seen in "The Army of the Potomac—A Sharpshooter on Picket Duty.-[From a painting by W. Homer, Esq.]," which appeared in print on 15 November 1862.

A wood engraving on newsprint, this particular image was based on Homer's first oil painting of the same name, which was based on camp sketches he made while imbedded with the Army of the Potomac during the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. By the time the painting was exhibited in January 1864, the horrors of war first seen during this operation were being regularly reported on and printed in image form. Nevertheless, several people both in the public and in the army still viewed Berdan Sharpshooters as heartless killers. Years later even Homer remarked, "I looked through one of their [sharpshooters'] rifles once when they were in a peach orchard in front of Yorktown in April 1862" and it "struck me as being as near murder as anything I could think of in connection with the army & I always had a horror of that branch of the service" (np).

Homer's close-up on this "Dead Eye for the Union" is composed in such a way that it is as if the viewer is sitting in the adjoining tree, partaking of this isolated life. Particularly interesting is Homer's use of line to draw attention to the shooter's eye as it stares down the barrel of the telescopic scope, drawing a bead on another unsuspecting kill that could be as far as one mile away. As Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr. notes, "Homer's image of the sharpshooter is all the more forceful and meaningful because of the extraordinary visual and symbolic compactness of its form that makes the subject not an incident or episode of the war, but an emblem of what is essential in and special to it" (22).