Focus on The Cotton Pickers and analyze the Analysis.
Homer's contemporaries praised the artist as the first to see the possibilities of untapped subject matter. In contrast to the caricatures painted of African Americans during and after the Civil War, Homer's representation of rural workers in heroic terms drew upon a popular European style of the time. These elements are well represented in the work of French artists Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton. Homer similarly portrayed his laborers with respect and sympathy as graceful majestic figures, as well as unmistakably American subjects. "The Cotton Pickers" has been called "the artist’s most monumental painting of the figure; that it should also be of African American subjects is remarkable."The women's slavery past is imprinted on their faces as is their future in an inevitable cycle of labor. Though the master-slave relationship was undone by the Emancipation Proclamation, slave-holding ideologies remained intact for many more years. The vast expanse of land portrayed in "The Cotton Pickers" is likely part of a large farm or plantation, indicating that the two figures are common wage laborers. No progress from the women’s labor is visible, although their basket and sack are full. The boundless nature of the field suggests that the work will never be finished. To emphasize the concept of a never-ending endeavor, Homer places the cotton plants so the viewer cannot see the laborers’ legs, providing an illusion that the pair are unable to move or escape from bondage.The field hands are isolated in terms of color, which suggests their isolation in life. The foreground color is dense and heightened, while the background is much lighter and less intensified. The background is perceived as light and weightless, against which the darkly-painted laborers are viewed as still bound to the epoch of slavery. Despite this, the women give the impression of looking forward with thoughtfulness and determination. They stand erect, emanating the force of will to handle their difficult circumstances. In painting the background, Homer may even offer the promise of a better future. From left to right, the horizon progresses from a single tree to a forest, which might be interpreted as "one hope turning into a unified force of change."According to a contemporary art historian, by depicting the women as mulattoes with characteristic Caucasian features such as light skin and fine facial bone structure, Homer indicates they are of mixed race parentage. Increase in the mulatto population from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century resulted from the sexual abuse of enslaved black women by their Southern planter masters. "The Cotton Pickers" presumes the women's fathers were white plantation owners. During Homer's time, mixed-blood heritage was thought to be an obstacle to black Americans' advancement. Individuals fearful of threats to white racial purity theorized that mulattos were "doomed to biological eradication and could not reproduce beyond a few generations." Unable to sustain this heritage, "the mulatto would be denied a place in America’s future" and the world of the powerless mixed-race individual would be one in which major change for the black community could never occur. Homer's portrayal of the women as mulattoes may characterize them as having limited potential for successful futures. Reality, however, often proved quite different. Because many mulattos were born to wealthy white fathers, they often received special treatment both within the black community and from slave holding relatives.A fellow scholar and critic concludes that in "The Cotton Pickers", "Homer creates a gap between the specificity of the realistic details and the mysterious evocativeness of the expressions and oblique glances that makes the uneasy relationship of consciousness to ordinary life the subject of the painting." His figures "look out of the frame space, beyond the physical world defined by their paintings... beckoning the "viewer to look beyond social valuations and depictions...to an appreciation of an intangible, gentle sublimity in which the individual consciousness participates, separated from the group or the social task at hand and not communicable in effects of light and color." The result is a conception of the individual as in some sense 'all dressed up with no place to go' with a consciousness that potentially will not be expressed or translated into worldly roles, actions, or identities."
Jules Breton mulattoes African Americans Jean-François Millet South Civil War Emancipation Proclamation