Focus on The Cotton Pickers and discuss the Background.
Early in his artistic career, Homer apprenticed to a lithographer creating images for sheet music and other publications. After the apprenticeship ended, he began making illustrations on a regular freelance basis for the magazine Harper’s Weekly. When the Civil War began, Harper’s made him an artist-correspondent with the Army of the Potomac. Over the next few years, the artist directly witnessed and recorded life in the Union Army.Homer made many sketches that served as the basis for magazine illustrations. Toward the end of the war, he began using them for his own paintings. The first of these to use African American subjects is a work called "The Bright Side." The piece is acknowledged as Homer’s transition from illustrator to painter. Its subject matter and small size mark the piece as illustration, while its style points to Homer’s future as a realist painter.After the war, the artist's interest in painting the lives of former slaves led him to return visits to Petersburg, Virginia, where he had spent time during the Civil War's final siege. From 1874 to 1876, Homer made studies for and may have painted a series of watercolors and paintings of the life of rural African Americans. Because of his realistic portrayals and sensitivity towards his subjects, the painter is known as “first American consistently to paint African Americans without the prevailing attitudes of condescension and sentimentality.”"The Cotton Pickers" is considered to be Homer's most outstanding painting depicting the post-war period.In 1876, the year the painting was made, Federal troops were being withdrawn from the South as Reconstruction came to an end. During this period, the focus of the Federal Government shifted from aiding its vulnerable new citizens, to helping rich industrialists fight labor unions. In the post-war years preceding “The Cotton Pickers,” African-Americans had hopes of vast improvements in their lives. This optimism, however, was short lived, as continued racism and a harsher form of black codes, the Jim Crow Laws would soon be implemented.
Union Army sheet music labor unions Federal Government Jim Crow Laws African Americans African-American "The Bright Side." Army of the Potomac South Harper’s Weekly Civil War lithographer Reconstruction