A Visit from the Old Mistress

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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

Date

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

Data Source

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Topic

Figure group

African American

History\United States\Black History

Allegory\civic\injustice

Architecture Interior\domestic

http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/vk755e0337e-753a-4a90-8da1-7e2b089b2ace

saam_1909.7.28

SAAM

A VISIT FROM THE OLD MISTRESS