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The Army of the Potomac--A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty
Winslow Homer (born Boston, MA 1836-died Prout's Neck, ME 1910)
1862
- Medium
- wood engraving on paper
- Classification
- Graphic arts
- Dimensions
- image: 9 1/8 x 13 3/4 in. (23.2 x 35.1 cm)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Graphic Arts
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of International Business Machines Corporation
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
Winslow Homer created an image of a Union sharpshooter while working as an artist-correspondent for Harper's Weekly during the Civil War. The soldier looks through the sight of a telescopic rifle as he searches for a target. Sharpshooters were called for duty when there was a lull in the action and weary soldiers from both North and South were resting. Reviled as "murderers" by both sides, sharpshooters usually were executed if captured. Years after the Civil War ended, Homer recounted his memory of peering through the scope in a company of Union sharpshooters. "I looked through one of their rifles once when they were in a peach orchard in front of Yorktown in April, 1862," he recalled. "The . . . impression struck me as being as near murder as anything I ever think of in connection with the army & I always had a horror of that branch of the service."
