There's much more to Winslow Homer than his dramatic seascapes

Until the invention of photography war reportage depended on old-fashioned illustration, and even after that the illustrated press took a while to catch up. Photographic reproduction didn’t work on cheap newsprint, which demanded a crispness of definition that early photography couldn’t provide. So reports on the American Civil War in the new illustrated periodicals aimed at the middle classes continued to rely on wood engraving, and it was as a print designer that the 25-year-old Winslow Homer was sent by Harper’s Weekly to cover the fighting in 1861.

Apprenticed to a commercial lithographer at the age of 19, Homer had no formal training as an artist but he had a nose for the decisive moment that added drama to a reporter’s copy. In Virginia in 1862, with the Army of the Potomac, he fixed on a Yankee sniper up a tree getting a distant enemy in his cross hairs. If the image – captioned ‘The Army of the Potomac – Sharp-shooter on Picket Duty’ – pleased the magazine’s Union-supporting readers, it made the Boston-born artist deeply uncomfortable. Thirty-two years later he confessed in a letter that the experience of looking at a human target through a rifle sight in a Potomac peach orchard struck him ‘as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army’. The following year he worked through his feelings on the subject in what was possibly his first painting in oils.

Growing up in an established New England family, Homer was saddled with a sense of right and wrong that could have been a bar to artistic success, and from early on in his painting career he left his meanings open to interpretation. With its Confederate soldier outlined against the sky the composition of his painting ‘Defiance, Inviting a Shot before Petersburg’ (1864) has all the immediacy of Robert Capa’s famous ‘Falling Solider’ shot during the Spanish Civil War, except that Homer undercuts his soldier’s bravado by painting a black minstrel figure in the trench below accompanying his jig on a banjo – one of the first of many black subjects to appear in his paintings.