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A Visit from the Old Mistress

  • Winslow Homer, A Visit from the Old Mistress, 1876, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.28

Gallery Label
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

Title
A Visit from the Old Mistress
Artist
Winslow Homer
Date
1876
On View
  1. Smithsonian American Art Museum
  2. 2nd Floor
  3. East Wing
Dimensions
18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61.0 cm.)
Copyright
Credit Line

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Gift of William T. Evans

Mediums
oil
Mediums Description
oil on canvas
Classifications
Painting
Keywords
  • Architecture Interior – domestic
  • History – United States – Black History
  • Occupation – other – slave
  • Allegory – civic – injustice
  • Ethnic – African-American
  • Figure group
Object Number
1909.7.28
Palette
Linked Open Data URI

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