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Like Copley, Homer was from Boston and mainly self-taught. In the 1850s Boston had no art school, and his only training was in a lithography shop. This led to illustration work for magazines, and at 25 he went to cover the Civil War for Harper's Weekly. His Civil War paintings, as distinct from those illustrations, were mostly genre scenes in camp--soldiers relaxing or on punishment duty. His most popular early painting, and deservedly so, was Prisoners from the Front, 1866, which shows the Union's General Francis Barlow receiving three Confederate soldiers captured at the battle of Spotsylvania: a young, tough Virginian cavalryman, a grizzled old vet and a lumpish "poor white" boy. Though it has been praised for its evenhandedness, it's hard to see how, short of caricature, Homer could have come up with a more ideological image of the difference between the two sides of the war. Barlow looks frank and intelligent, contrasted with the mean-as-hell firebrand look of the Southern cavalier, the old man who is too old to change and the cracker kid who is too dumb to develop.
Not one of the Civil War paintings shows a dead body, but Homer did allegorize death in a painting done just after the war, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865. A man in a white shirt, whose face we don't see, has returned to his farm, and is scything its ripe wheat, which stretches to the blue band of the horizon. His blue Army jacket and water canteen, lying on the ground, identify him as a Union soldier. The composition is stark: one man, two planes of color--the stalks of wheat swiftly done in ocher with umber streaks of shadow rising through them from the earth--and the crooked diagonal of the scythe at the end of its swing. We are meant to think of Isaiah: "And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
But why a new field? Here, as co-curator Cikovsky's brilliant catalog essay points out, a deeper level is seen. The new field of wheat recalls the soldier's "old" field--the ghastly killing grounds, some of which (like Antietam) were actually wheat fields, where the ripe youth of America was mowed down. And so an image that ostensibly speaks of sunlit peace and reconciliation remains a harsh and troubling one and presages the symbolic note that will flicker in and out of Homer's art for the next 40 years, making it very much more than a celebration of America the Beautiful.
After the war, however, Homer--like all other American artists except the sculptor Saint-Gaudens--worked as though the trauma was best forgotten. He turned to an ideal but real subject matter as far from death as possible. This was childhood. Homer painted the life of American children as a distinct state, an enclosure: adults hardly touch their lives, but you know they are secure. His farmers' and fishers' children are, on one level, part of the wide idealization of childhood that took hold in 1870s America as a reaction against the war. They are potential America, the stock from which renewal will spring: young, strong, practical and without pretense, and bathed in Homer's candid, crystalline light.