Item #5910 Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook. Winslow Homer.
Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.
Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.
Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.
Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.
Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.
Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.
Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.
Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.

Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.

Homer, Winslow.

Campaign Sketches: The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook.

Boston: Louis Prang, 1863. Two hand-colored lithographs, 10.875” x 8.625” and 10.625” x 8.562”, both with Homer’s printed signature in the image, both sheets partially affixed to larger paperboard mounts. Accompanied by an early manuscript note identifying the colorist as Homer. CONDITION: Good, some mat burn at edges, damp-stain to lower left corner of Baggage Train mount, with small brown stain (1 x 1 cm) affecting lower left corner of print; manuscript note laminated.

Two Civil War lithographs from this rare series of six, these examples hand-colored and enhanced by Winslow Homer himself in the very year that he created his first serious painting (The Sharpshooter) and well before he turned to the serious use of watercolor as an innovative medium of expression. One of these two lithographs—The Baggage Train—was loaned to the exhibition Winslow Homer and the Photograph, at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Brandywine Museum in 2018–19.

In October of 1861, the illustrated newspaper Harper’s Weekly dispatched Winslow Homer to the encampment of the Army of the Potomac as a “special artist,” where he made numerous war-related drawings that were reproduced as wood-engravings. In addition to the work published in Harper’s, in 1863 Boston lithographer Louis Prang published Campaign Sketches, a set of six lithographs, which, as noted by Lloyd Goodrich, “In their first-hand observation and graphic skill...were close to his drawings made at the front.” Homer, who had worked for the Boston lithographic firm of Buffords earlier in his career, is thought to have drawn the images on the lithographic stones himself. All portray subjects drawn from camp life and reflect Homer’s close observations of the scene around him. Originally conceived as a collection of lithographs issued in two parts, only the first part was published, apparently due to lack of demand—a circumstance that has likely contributed to the work's rarity. 

The two examples from this series offered here, The Baggage Train and The Jolly Cook—the only two in the series to depict African Americans or contrabands, as enslaved men and women who escaped to the Union army were known—show Homer experimenting with watercolor, apparently to satisfy his curiosity about what these prints would look like in color. It is known that Homer gave some thought to this matter, as he alluded to it in a December 1863 letter to Louis Prang, noting “I have seen a copy of ‘Campaign Sketches.’ The cover is very neat and the pictures look better than they would in color…” While Homer may have been correct about this had such coloring been applied by the average colorist, the results of his own efforts create a very different impression. Indeed, the nuanced application of color in evidence here, which includes the addition of various details not inherent in the underlying lithograph, show Homer taking great care to create a vivid work of art. Homer evidently intended these two experiments to resemble original watercolors as closely as possible, as the printed title and margins have been trimmed off.

A circa 1900 note in ink, on paper once affixed to the back of a frame that held The Baggage Train, attests to the coloring as Homer’s work:

One of a series of the Campaign Sketches, (Civil War) probably six (6) in number, as no others have ever come to light. It is very important to consider that these lithographs, 4º in size, were drawn on stone by Winslow Homer himself, not made by some other artist after his original work, and all are signed (Homer) or (W. H. or H.). This, the within [i.e., within the frame] is one of two (2) of the series that were actually colored by Winslow Homer, and it is, too, beyond question, the only two…the gentleman possessing the other lithograph in color has also the complete series of six with the original wrapper.

Homer’s decision to paint the two African American images in the series perhaps reflects his particular interest in the people whose plight lay at the heart of the war. While depicting scenes he almost certainly witnessed, these images (The Jolly Cook, in particular) nevertheless reflect the prevailing tendency at the time to satirize African Americans. However, as Homer matured as an artist, so too did his representations of black people. As Guy McElroy has noted:

At a time when most American artists treated blacks with a mixture of clichéd condescension and incomprehension, Homer evolved a personal conception of black identity based on close observation that allowed him to combine physiognomical accuracy and symbolic complexity. After producing a few caricatures as a young artist, his war reportage and early paintings show a growing sophistication in their conception of black subjects. Beginning in the 1870s, Homer’s pioneering perceptions of black people deviated significantly from the increasingly negative or limited role accorded African Americans at the end of postwar Reconstruction.

Although Homer witnessed relatively few battles during his time on the front, spending most of his time in camp making observations such as those reflected in Campaign Sketches, the war awakened his deepest instincts as an artist and proved far more formative than the conventional artist’s sojourn in France he would take shortly thereafter. Instead, as Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. has observed “the war became his school…more than any other experience, it was instrumental in determining what sort of artist Homer became…an event less unprecedented, less intensely and inescapably modern, could not have exerted the same challenging demands on his inventiveness and artistic intelligence; an event less historically momentous and nationally traumatic would not have as fully aroused his consciousness and convictions and made of him a moral and political being.” The lithographs of Campaign Sketches belong to this formative period and thus to the emergence of one of the major figures in American art, and arguably the greatest American artist of the nineteenth century. 

An important pair of lithographs relating closely to Winslow Homer's early development as a painter and his developing conceptions of African Americans. 

REFERENCES: Goodrich, Lloyd. The Graphic Art of Winslow Homer (NY, 1968), p. 10; Cikovsky, Nicolai. Winslow Homer (Washington, 1995), p. 19; McElroy, Guy C. Facing History : The Black Image in American Art 1710-1940 (San Francisco, 1990), p. 78.

Item #5910

Price: $45,000.00

See all items in Prints & Drawings
See all items by Winslow Homer