Cotton Pickers (1876). Oil on canvas. 61 x 97. The Cotton Pickers, 1876 is an oil painting by Winslow Homer of two young African-American women in a cotton field. Stately, silent and with barely a flicker of sadness on their faces, the two black women in the painting are unmistakable in their disillusionment: they picked cotton before the war and they are still picking cotton afterward. It is oil on canvas, 24 1/16 x 38 1/8 in. The painting is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Early in his artistic career, Homer apprenticed to a lithographer creating images for sheet music and other publications. After the apprenticeship ended, he began making illustrations on a regular freelance basis for the magazine Harper's Weekly. When the Civil War began, Harper's made him an artist-correspondent with the Army of the Potomac. Over the next few years, the artist directly witnessed and recorded life in the Union Army. Homer made many sketches that served as the basis for magazine illustrations. Toward the end of the war, he began using them for his own paintings. The first of these to use African American subjects is a work called The Bright Side. The piece is acknowledged as Homer's transition from illustrator to painter. Its subject matter and small size mark the piece as illustration, while its style points to Homer's future as a realist painter. After the war, the artist's interest in painting the lives of former slaves led him to return visits to Petersburg, Virginia, where he had spent time during the Civil War's final siege. From 1874 to 1876, Homer made studies for and may have painted a series of watercolors and paintings of the life of rural African Americans. Because of his realistic portrayals and sensitivity towards his subjects, the painter is known as first American consistently to paint African Americans without the prevailing attitudes of condescension and sentimentality. The Cotton Pickers is considered to be Homer's most outstanding painting depicting the post-war period. In 1876, the year the painting was made, Federal troops were being withdrawn from the South as Reconstruction came to an end. During this period, the focus of the Federal Government shifted from aiding its vulnerable new citizens, to helping rich industrialists fight labor unions. In the post-war years preceding The Cotton Pickers, African-Americans had hopes of vast improvements in their lives. This optimism, however, was short lived, as continued racism and a harsher form of black codes, the Jim Crow Laws would soon be implemented. In The Cotton Pickers, Homer employs a palette of browns and silvery grays on a canvas that measures approximately 24 by 38 inches. The piece offers a realistic view of two female slave-like workers. The women are presented from a low vantage point, filling the canvas and dominating the composition. They are dressed in humble clothing, cotton blouses and long skirts. The colors are blurred and dim with little contrast in shadow and texture, except for the background which appears much lighter than the women. The darker colors with which the pair are painted establish the work's entire atmosphere. Judging by the light, the scene is set in early morning. As the women have nearly filled their basket and sack, they have probably been working since before dawn. Both are silent with vivid expressions. The painter renders the pair with a combination of black and white physical characteristics. Neither woman is picking cotton. The unhappy one on the left, holding a bushel basket, stoops to brush a plant with her hand. The woman on the right, gunny sack slug across her shoulder, stands erect gazing into the distance, a poignant image of inner life and aspiration. Her demeanor might be interpreted as one of defiance or hatred. While the figures are painted as powerful and heroic, they are also portrayed as individuals. Far into the distance, Homer places a low blue-green mountain range bordered on the left by a forest and on the right by a single pine rising high above the pale field. Homer's contemporaries praised the artist as the first to see the possibilities of untapped subject matter. In contrast to the caricatures painted of African Americans during and after the Civil War, Homer's representation of rural workers in heroic terms drew upon a popular European style of the time. These elements are well represented in the work of French artists Jean-Francois Millet and Jules Breton. Homer similarly portrayed his laborers with respect and sympathy as graceful majestic figures, as well as unmistakably American subjects. The Cotton Pickers has been called the artist's most monumental painting of the figure; that it should also be of African American subjects is remarkable. The women's slavery past is imprinted on their faces as is their future in an inevitable cycle of labor.