Teaching Art History with Treefrog Treasures (3 Viewers)

[PolarBear]

In Memory of Shannon Reuss (1970-2015)

Part 1 8/17/16

I am by training an art historian. I am also a collector of toy soldiers many of which I have purchased from the nice folks at Treefrog Treasures. As an art historian, I am currently writing an essay about an American painting entitled The Old Mill. It was created in 1871 by Massachusetts born artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910). Those of you who collect Civil War figures may be familiar with the illustrations of that conflict that he did as a Special Artist for Harper's Weekly as well as his oil paintings on the subject. There have been two previous scholarly articles about The Old Mill. The first in the context of women working in the textile mills of New England and the second which identifies the main figure in the painting as a school teacher.My interpretation also looks at that figure but in a new way focusing on what she is wearing. The working title of my essay is "THE TASTE OF FREEDOM " : Winslow Homer and the Woman in the Red Jacket.

As I have worked on this project and been reading a wide variety of background material, it occurred to me that my subject is related to my toy soldier collecting. I thought this would be a great way to introduce this topic to an audience of fellow collectors. I realized that Treefrog Treasures is another form of resource to interpret and explain this very interesting work of art. Winslow Homer tried to avoid explaining what his paintings meant and let the works speak for themselves. However, he left a number of visual clues in his art works that provide art historians with a basis for interpretation. For me, the most important clue is the red jacket she is wearing. The garment is known as a "Garibaldi Jacket" named for the Italian patriot, soldier and revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882). It was very popular in the 1860s, especially during the American Civil War. Like the Zouave jacket it was a very popular fashion for women.

This thread will be an ongoing effort of exploring the painting in the context of the history and individuals of the time. I will add new installments as each is ready that will explain my interpretation which I hope will be of interest. In this first installment I have included a photograph of the artist taken in 1867, the painting itself, a detail of the woman in red, and a montage of toy soldiers from Treefrog Treasures that helped inspire this project.

Stay Tuned

Randy

 

[Mirof]

Well I understand your desire in interpretation of a painting
May I suggest you to have a look at the mini english serie "The Mill", so far away from the painting in colours, light, atmosphere, space .
A total opposition between the 2 interpretations, I would call the painting a romantic one, the serie a crude reality .

Best regards

 

[PolarBear]

Part 2 8/18/16

Background:

Winslow Homer is best known as a painter of rural American life and the sea (see the two attached examples: The Rustics 1874 and Dad's Coming 1873).

 

[PolarBear]

However, between 1868 and1873 he created four works of art related to the manufacture of textiles in New England. Industrial subject matter was not a popular subject among American painters in the 19th Century. The public's taste supported the Jeffersonian agrarian view of America. The industrial revolution in American Art would have to wait for photographers such as Lewis Hine in the early 20th Century who captured the plight of labor in what William Blake described as "the dark satanic mills." Hine was especially good at portraying the children working in these mills.


Photo by Lewis Hine1908

 

[PolarBear]

Of the four works on the subject of mills created by Homer, the three wood engravings I shall show you are the most critical of the system. The Old Mill, his only oil painting related to the subject is on the surface a more romanticized view of the subject. Yet within its rustic setting there is a message that suggests a critique of the system and its impact upon those who labored within it, especially the women workers.

Massachusetts had become a major location for this industry with many mills located in Lowell and Lawrence which were major players in what Harvard historian Sven Beckert has called the Empire of Cotton. This empire was a global phenomenon and played a significant role in the development of a capitalist economy in North America and globally.


The Old Mill 1871

 

[PolarBear]

Both of Homer's brothers were involved in that empire so it is not surprising that he tackled this subject. His younger brother Arthur who had moved to Texas after the Civil War, would become a cotton buyer/broker in 1874 in Galveston one of the major port cities of the southwest. By then Texas had become a significant source of cotton for the industrial North. Arthur Homer had had prior experience with cotton during the Civil War and then during Reconstruction. Between 1863 and 1865 he had served in the Union Navy aboard the USS Argosy, a tinclad that was part of the Mississippi River Squadron under Admiral David Dixon Porter. Among their duties was confiscating bales of cotton that had been abandoned by the owners of plantations along the river as Union forces spread into the area.

Arthur Benson Acting Ensign USN
USS Argosy
Galveston Cotton Exchange
Cotton Office Galveston, Texas (Diorama by Polarbear using W. Hocker figures)

 

[PolarBear]

After the Civil War, Arthur worked as an agent for the Freedmen's Bureau in Brazoria County, Texas. There he served as an advocate for the emancipated slaves who had worked on local plantations and now were either tenant farmers or worked for wages for their former masters. In 1876 Winslow likely influenced by his brothers service to Freedmen in Texas traveled to Reconstruction Virginia where he recorded two young African American women in one of his most famous paintings The Cotton Pickers which is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Chiwetel Ejiofor, the star of 12 Years A Slave visited LACMA multiple times to see the painting in person prior to filming.



Freedman Tenant Farmer with Shovel (figure by W. Britain)
Cotton Pickers 1876 by Winslow Homer
Cotton Field Scene from 12 Years A Slave with actor Chiwetel Ejiofor

 

[PolarBear]

Homer's older brother Charles had trained as a textile chemist at Harvard during the 1850s. After graduation Charles had gone to work as one of the first industrial chemists in the nation. He was employed at the Pacific Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts where he worked on color dyes for the textiles being produced at the mill. It was Charles who introduced Winslow to the major text on color theory: M.E. Chevreul's The Laws of Contrast of Colour and Their Application to the Arts (1859).


Portrait of Charles S.Homer Jr. by Winslow Homer
Pacific Mills, Lawrence, Mass. 1876

 

[PolarBear]

The earliest of Homer's industrial cotton works dates from 1868. It is a wood engraving entitled New England Factory Life --"Bell-Time" and appeared in Harper's Weekly on July 25. Homer set the picture among the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts where brother Charles was working at the time. We are looking at the Washington Mill during dismissal time of the workers. A wave of humanity fills the pictorial space stretching all the way back to the bridge where employees are streaming out of the factory. This mass exodus demonstrates the large increase in the labor force in the years after the war when industrialism and the rise of corporations and the so-called "Robber Barons" were on the verge of making their presence felt in the economy. The veritable sea of workers in this scene are Homer's critique of industrialism. They symbolize the rise of a more impersonal mass society of workers who have replaced the individual artisans of the past. Eventually large scale resistance to industrialism would develop. Unions such as the Knights of Labor appeared in 1869. Strikes and labor violence beginning with the Great Strike of 1877 would mark the coming decades. The textile industry in New England had changed dramatically from what it had been in its early years in Lowell, Massachusetts where the workers were primarily young farm girls who had left the rural homes to make money to support their themselves and family members.

 

[PolarBear]

In 1870 Homer created a second wood engraving this time an illustration for William Cullen Bryant's poem "The Song of the Sower". Entitled "The Clanking Shuttle" we see a room of machines monitored entirely by young women. In contrast New England Factory Life had shown the new face of labor now consisting of men, women and children of various ages and backgrounds. The workers now display a variety of ethnic origins (including the Irish Catholics who arrived on American shores in the wake of the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-50) in contrast to the female WASPs of "The Clanking Shuttle". Bryant's poem, however, foreshadows the earlier illustration:

"In the long row of humming rooms,
And into ponderous masses wind
The web that, from a thousand looms,
Comes forth to clothe mankind."

Homer's workforce in New England Factory Life are part of that "ponderous mass" working amongst a "thousand looms".

 

[PolarBear]

The last of Homer's wood engravings relating to the industrial aspects of cotton was The Morning Bell of 1873. This is perhaps the cotton illustration that has the most explicit message of critique among Homer's industrial images. The title emphasizes the regime of time and the clock that were integral to industrial labor. When published in the December 13, issue of Harper's Weekly it was accompanied by a poem that captured the tyranny of the clock and bell of the manufacturing system which is reflected in the mood and posture of the workers heading off to labor at one of the mills:

THE MORNING BELL

"Now the late bell which rouses from sweet dreams
Some fair young sleeper in her downy bed
And bids her rise to spend the new-born day
'Neath folly's rule, by fashion's scepter led;

Not the sweet bell which in the church tower hangs,
And calls with silvery tongue the hour of prayer--
Not that; for in response to its dear tones
The weary ones would find their rest from care.

Ah, no! 'Tis but the heavy factory bell,
Which takes its tone from factory noise and din,
And wearily responding to its call
Behold a day of hardship must begin!

And slowly in the well-worn, toilsome path
Go those whose paths seem ever cast in shade,
While others reap the sunshine of their toil
By these the factory bell must be obeyed.

And so the morning bell rings ever on,
And so the weary feet obey its call,
Till o'er the earth silence at last shall come,
And death bring peace and rest alike to all.

The transition from America as an agrarian society to an industrial one has been described as the "machine in the garden." That change brought about major resistance from workers and the labor movement.


Next time we will begin to examine Homer's The Old Mill in detail.

 

[PolarBear]

Both of Homer's brothers were involved in that empire so it is not surprising that he tackled this subject. His younger brother Arthur who had moved to Texas after the Civil War, would become a cotton buyer/broker in 1874 in Galveston one of the major port cities of the southwest. By then Texas had become a significant source of cotton for the industrial North. Arthur Homer had had prior experience with cotton during the Civil War and then during Reconstruction. Between 1863 and 1865 he had served in the Union Navy aboard the USS Argosy, a tinclad that was part of the Mississippi River Squadron under Admiral David Dixon Porter. Among their duties was confiscating bales of cotton that had been abandoned by the owners of plantations along the river as Union forces spread into the area.

Arthur Benson Homer Acting Ensign USN
USS Argosy
Galveston Cotton Exchange
Cotton Office Galveston, Texas (Diorama by Polarbear using W. Hocker figures)

In cutting and pasting my text from my Word Doc Arthur Homer's last name got cut. I have corrected it here. Arthur was named for his uncle Arthur W. Benson, a NY merchant, real estate developer and later president of Brooklyn Gas and Light.

 

[7th OVI]

This will be interesting, Homer was always one of my favorite ACW 19th century artists. I have always wanted to do one of his or one of Edwin Forbes or William Sheppard's illustrations in diorama format. Chris

 

[PolarBear]

This will be interesting, Homer was always one of my favorite ACW 19th century artists. I have always wanted to do one of his or one of Edwin Forbes or William Sheppard's illustrations in diorama format. Chris

Chris

I would love to see WB do a set of Homer's The Briarwood Pipe or a figure of Homer's cousin Francis Channing Barlow.
Randy

 

[REVWARBUFF]

This is all very interesting Randy and I love how you tie all this history into our hobby.

The dio with the Hocker figures is exceptionally well done!

Thanks for sharing this and I look forward to your next installment.

Mark

 

[PolarBear]

Part 3

The Old Mill

I want to begin to look at Homer's The Old Mill in more detail. The setting is rural. We know that Homer painted it in a wooded section of Belmont, Massachusetts called Waverley Oaks. Belmont was an upscale location and some of Homer's family and relatives were living there when he painted his picture. The scene consists of two buildings, a country mill on the left and what is believed to be a classic one room schoolhouse A in the wooded background between the two groups of figures: the woman crossing the bridge, carrying a lunch pail and wearing a straw coalscuttle straw hat, red jacket and a burnt umber (reddish brown) skirt and behind her a group of three country maidens wearing sunbonnets and country style calico dresses and also carrying their lunch pails. There is a dog B sniffing at the base of a tree next to the bridge and a black bird C in the sky in the background. It is a bright sunny day and the light highlights the central figure in red: whom I see as Homer's "heroine" of this pictorial narrative.

As I have mentioned it is very different from the three wood engravings that I introduced in Part 2. It is important to realize that at the time the mill images were created, Homer was working for two audiences. Two of the engravings were done for the mass media of his day: the new pictorial press represented most famously by Harper's Weekly. The Harper's publication had begun in New York in 1857. At that time and in the decades that followed newspapers and magazines were not able to reproduce photographs and relied upon wood engravings for their illustrations. An artist, like Homer would draw his illustration on a block of wood which was then engraved into the wood block by the staff at Harper's. The block was added to the text's type and the whole unit was inked and then printed. The illustrations were usually meant to accompany an article or story given to the artist. It was his job to graphically interpret that material. The audience was the general reading public not collectors of art. An oil painting like The Old Mill was meant for the art market of collectors and museums. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts had opened in 1870. Therefore subject matter and content in a painting was geared to such an audience. Thus The Old Mill is not negative in its presentation of the subject of industrialization in New England. In fact the reality of the urban mills is missing entirely. Art collectors and the public that followed the art world wanted more reassuring images that their world was not undergoing radical changes.

Illustrations:

The Old Mill Winslow Homer 1871
Waverley Oaks Winslow Homer 1864

 

[PolarBear]

It is informative to look at The Old Mill and The Morning Bell together. As you will immediately see Homer has used aspects of the painting for the engraving but he has re-purposed them to coincide with the poem that accompanied the illustration in Harper's. Thus in the latter the mill has become more prominent as has the bell atop the building. This is to emphasize the impact of industrial time on the work force. The postures and demeanors of the figures show a prevalent weariness and unhappiness with their lot in life. There lay the seeds for future resistance. There are six people in The Morning Bell print in contrast to the four in The Old Mill. The Morning Bell has added a man and a boy as part of the workforce. The three females wearing sunbonnets have been carried over from The Morning Bell but now the three are no longer a group. As a trained illustrator working for the press on a tight schedule, Homer learned at an early stage of his career to reuse and repurpose elements from earlier works not only for his commercial work but also in his paintings. An example is The Fisherman's Wife of 1873 which is set on the same bridge with a schoolhouse visible in the background.

Illustrations:
The Morning Bell 1873 Winslow Homer
The Fisherman's Wife 1873 Winslow Homer

 

[PolarBear]

As mentioned previously, The Old Mill was painted in Belmont at Waverley Oaks. We also know the name of the individual who had modeled for the woman in the red jacket: Elizabeth Loring Grant of Belmont. She was the daughter of a well-to-do Boston broker. Homer had sketched her several times in 1866 when she was 15. In 1871 when she posed for The Old Mill she would have been between 19 and 20 depending on the month the painting was completed.

Illustrations

Elizabeth Loring Grant 1866 by Winslow Homer

To Be Continued

 

[PolarBear]

Part 4

The Old Mill and the Little Red Schoolhouse

Is The Old Mill about more than one subject? Is the woman in the red jacket a millworker or is she a school teacher or could she be both? We know that this painting has had several different titles applied to it. When I began teaching in the early 1970s, the painting was called The Morning Bell. The original 19th Century title had been lost. Since the setting was similar to Homer's 1873 print The Morning Bell this was the name applied to the painting in the books about American Art or Winslow Homer. Eventually scholars found the original exhibition records showing that the correct title was The Old Mill.

 

[PolarBear]

Winslow Homer scholar Nicolai Cikovsky was responsible for seeing the painting's relationship to the subject of American schools and their female teachers. Exhibition records showed that when Homer first displayed the painting in a public gallery it was part of a pair shown together and both had been done in 1871. The second painting was entitled The Country School and featured the same woman who was wearing the red jacket in The Old Mill but is now seen on another day. Her straw hat is hanging up on the wall and although she is now wearing a black dress she has on a white apron like the woman in the red jacket. For a teacher the apron was to keep chalk dust off her clothing. The blackboard and chalk had been a recent addition to schools.

An important detail of The Country School is the bell on the right side of the teacher’s desk. (see detail below) It provides a link to the mill pictures which also include bells as symbols of the role time schedules were playing in an industrialized America. The school bell had a prominent place in Homer’s The Noon Recess of 1873 which he did both as an oil painting and a wood engraving. A pupil has been kept in at recess for not doing his homework. The teacher has to stay there with him when she would rather be outside with the children. Such a scene could be called “Kept In” in which neither teacher nor pupil is happy with the loss of freedom. The bell on the table will soon be used to call the students back inside.


Women had become a larger presence in the workforce in both manufacturing and education during and after the Civil War replacing the soldiers away fighting the war and later those who did not return. There were also changes that had taken place within educational theory suggesting that women would make better teachers for younger students than their male counterparts who tended to be less understanding and more severe disciplinarians in the classroom. It should also be noted that the woman in the red jacket could historically be both a millworker and a teacher. Salaries for school teachers were low, especially for women and they often added to their income during the summer months by working in the mills. This was especially true in Homer's New England.

Illustrations:
The Country School 1871 W. Homer
Detail of teacher's desk and bell
Bell detail from The Old Mill
Noon Recess 1873 W. Homer
Detail of Noon Recess showing bell