Winslow Homer - Croquet Players (1865)

Winslow Homer (1836–1910) is regarded as the greatest American painter of the 19th century. Born in Boston and raised in rural Cambridge, he began his career as a commercial printmaker, first in Boston and then in New York, where he settled in 1859. He briefly studied oil painting in the spring of 1861. In October of the same year, he was sent to the front in Virginia as an artist-correspondent for the new illustrated journal Harper’s Weekly. Homer’s earliest Civil War paintings, dating from about 1863, are anecdotal, like his prints. As the war drew to a close, however, such canvases as The Veteran in a New Field (1865) and Prisoners from the Front (1866) reflect a more profound understanding of the war’s impact and meaning.