Winslow Homer's "A Visit from the Old Mistress.
"A Visit from the Old Mistress,"
by Winslow Homer
1876
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.28
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
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" It was one of several works that Homer created during a mid-1870s visit to Virginia, where he had served as a 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.
It, along with Homer's other paintings of black southern life from this period, have been praised as an "invaluable record of an important segment of life in Virginia during the Reconstruction."
Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Visit_from_the_Old_Mistress
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"This painting depicts an awkward stare-down between recently emancipated slaves and their former owner after the Civil War. The tension is palpable. Note in particular the differences in their clothing. The formerly enslaved women wear humble homepsun garments, including the long aprons and headscarves that were typical of enslaved women's dress. The mistress, on the other hand, dons a finer gown and lacy fichu. By highlighting how unequal power relations continued shape the lives of formerly enslaved women during Reconstruction, Homer explodes the feminist myth of kinship between female slaves and their mistresses."
Source: Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom fb page