Focus on A Visit from the Old Mistress and explain the abstract.
A Visit from the Old Mistress is an 1876 painting by the prominent 19th-century American artist Winslow Homer. It was one of several works that Homer is thought to have created during a mid-1870s visit to Virginia, where he had served for a time as a Union war correspondent during the Civil War. Scholars have noted that the painting's composition is taken from Homer's earlier painting Prisoners from the Front, which depicts a group of captive Confederate soldiers defiantly regarding a Union officer. Put on display in the northern states for a northern audience, A Visit from the Old Mistress, along with Homer's other paintings of black southern life from the Reconstruction era, has been praised as an "invaluable record of an important segment of life in Virginia during the Reconstruction."
Reconstruction era Prisoners from the Front Winslow Homer Civil War