Cotton Pickers. 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 f
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 f
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