A Visit from the Old Mistress

Winslow Homer, A Visit from the Old Mistress, 1876, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61.0 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.28

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Artwork Details

Title: A Visit from the Old Mistress
Artist: Winslow Homer
Date: 1876
Location: Smithsonian American Art Museum
/
2nd Floor
/
East Wing
Dimensions: 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61.0 cm.)
Credit Line: Gift of William T. Evans
Mediums: oil
Mediums Description: oil on canvas
Classifications: Painting
Subjects: Figure group
African American
History — United States — Black History
Allegory — civic — injustice
Architecture Interior — domestic
Object Number: 1909.7.28
Linked Open Data: https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/1909.7.28

Artwork Description

A Visit from the Old Mistress captures a tentative encounter in the postwar South. The freed slaves are no longer obliged to greet their former mistress with welcoming gestures, and one remains seated as she would not have been allowed to do before the war. Winslow Homer composed the work from sketches he had made while traveling through Virginia; it conveys a silent tension between two communities seeking to understand their future. The formal equivalence between the standing figures suggests the balance that the nation hoped to find in the difficult years of Reconstruction.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006

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In this podcast, curator Eleanor Jones Harvey discusses 6 featured paintings from The Civil War and American Art exhibition. This episode looks at A Visit from the Old Mistress by Winslow Homer. The Civil War and American Art examines how America's artists represented the impact of the Civil War and its aftermath. The exhibition follows the conflict from palpable unease on the eve of war, to heady optimism that it would be over with a single battle, to a growing realization that this conflict would not end quickly and a deepening awareness of issues surrounding emancipation and the need for reconciliation. Genre and landscape painting captured the transformative impact of the war, not traditional history painting.

ELEANOR HARVEY: In 1876, Winslow Homer traveled to Virginia, and on his return to New York, he painted several monumental works that explored the relationship between blacks and whites during the Reconstruction period in the South. In this painting, titled “A Visit from the Old Mistress,” Homer explores the new power relationship between black and white women after the emancipation of the slaves.

Here, this white woman, who clearly is visiting women who used to belong to her, is coming to the abrupt realization that these black women don’t particularly like her, they are not happy to see her and in fact whatever she has come to ask about, the answer may in fact be no. For the black women themselves, the ability to set the terms of their employment, to ask for wages, to decide who to work for and who not to work for and what tasks to do or to refuse to do is a new privilege and clearly, what is happening here, is an awkward moment between these two women and as they decide on what terms they will or won’t get along. The tension in this painting is palpable. The stare down between these two women is discomforting and extremely effective.

But Homer made a pivotal change in this painting. Between the time that he first painted it and the time that he sold it, he painted out what we can now see, which is the right arm of the white woman held close to her chest. It seems the former mistress may once have carried a red flower, perhaps a goodwill offering or a symbol of her own heartache, but Homer painted out this softening element and left the final image as one of stark confrontation. In doing so, he winnowed and concentrated the meeting, focusing on the tension between black and white and the unresolved issues at the end of the war. We can now see this arm, in part because over the last 100 years, the paint that Homer used to mask this has become slightly transparent and the ghost of that image of a hand clasping a flower can now be seen. It’s an opportunity to have a window into the changes in mind and mood that the artist made as he completed this work.