Winslow Homer at the mid-point of his career produce works depicting variously rural scenes of Northeast America, often children at play, as well as scenes from increasingly popular resorts, often fashionably dressed women. It is his quiet simplistic studies of rural American life in the mid-19th century that he is perhaps best remembered. Throughout all the tumualt of mid-19th century America, Homer has left us simple, but powerful images of rural life in a still largely agrarian country. The images of children are the most rememerable. There is no better depiction of rural American childhood during this period than Winslow Homer. The most famous is probably "Cracking the whip"(figure 1), but our favorite is "Huntsman and dogs" loaded on the previous page. These were water colors done after the Civil War in the 1870s, but depict more the children of Homer's own childhood before the War. We get the impresion that he was attempting to remember the more idealic America before the maelstrom of Civil War--the central event in American history. Henry James wrote of these paintings, "Barbarously simple. He has chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and civilization as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier; and, to reward his audacity, he has incontstably succeeded." They are both wondrful images of childhood as well as important historucal documents in theur on right. And tgey recorded what ohotography could not yet do very well, life outside the photigrapher's studio.
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