In this artwork, how is the Title and background of the General elucidated?
According to Homer's early biographer William Howe Downes, "Homer's attention had been strongly attracted to the negroes" while he was attached to the Union Army of the Potomac as a war correspondent, and he renewed this interest in 1877 when he took a tour of post-war Virginia and created a string of works focused on primarily black subjects. These works included well-known paintings such as Dressing for the Carnival (1877). According to Downes, "the only known reference to a southern trip was the one he made in 1877," but "the question of when and how often Homer revisited the South after the Civil War" remains open. Whether he had been back to Virginia and had observed a scene like the one in A Visit, or if he had simply composed it from memories assembled during his time in the war, or by means of studio sets, is therefore a matter of speculation. Some scholars maintain that Homer did, in fact, make earlier visits to Virginia in 1875 and 1876, wherein he came to understand blacks not merely as "a humorous object," as they seem to be in some of his Civil War-era sketches, but as serious and fundamentally human subjects in art, paving the way for his much more serious compositions in the 70's.The original title, and the title used today, A Visit from the Old Mistress, has a double meaning. Whether the title is intended to mean, "a visit from the former mistress," (suggesting that the blacks are now free) or that the title should mean, "a visit from the mistress who is old," (suggesting that, despite their emancipation, the former slaves are still under the power of their mistress), is left unclear. The painting has also been catalogued under the titles, The Visit to the Mistress (implying that the scene takes place in the mistress's manor) and The Visit of the Mistress (implying that the blacks in the painting remain under the power of their old mistress).
Dressing for the Carnival left Army of the Potomac studio sets Civil War