Object Details
- Artist
- Winslow Homer, born Boston, MA 1836-died Prout's Neck, ME 1910
- Gallery Label
- A Visit from the Old Mistress captures a tentative encounter in the postwar South. The freed slaves are no longer obliged to greet their former mistress with welcoming gestures, and one remains seated as she would not have been allowed to do before the war. Winslow Homer composed the work from sketches he had made while traveling through Virginia; it conveys a silent tension between two communities seeking to understand their future. The formal equivalence between the standing figures suggests the balance that the nation hoped to find in the difficult years of Reconstruction.Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006
- Credit Line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans
- 1876
- Object number
- 1909.7.28
- Restrictions & Rights
- CC0
- Type
- Painting
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61.0 cm.)
- See more items in
- Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection
- Department
- Painting and Sculpture
- On View
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2nd Floor, East Wing
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Topic
- Figure group
- African American
- History\United States\Black History
- Allegory\civic\injustice
- Architecture Interior\domestic
- Record ID
- saam_1909.7.28
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/vk755e0337e-753a-4a90-8da1-7e2b089b2ace
