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| Winslow Homer, The Sutler's Tent, 1863. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, gift of the Ahmanson Foundation |
The Ahmanson Foundation has funded the purchase of Winslow Homer's The Sutler's Tent for the Huntington. Though the painting is small (16-1/4 by 12 in), it fills a large hole in the Huntington's presentation of American art. It had no painting by Homer, often rated the quintessential American artist of his age, nor a direct depiction of the Civil War. The Sutler's Tent was created when Homer was a war artist for Harper's Weekly. Sutlers were civilians who sold supplies, food, and liquor to troops on the front line.
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| Harper's Weekly (after Winslow Homer), Thanksgiving in Camp, November 29, 1862 |
Harper's Weekly reproduced Homer's war art as wood engravings.
The Sutler's Tent is related to a Thanksgiving-themed illustration that ran in November 1862. That means the engraving came before the painting, dated 1863. The horizontal-format print shows many more figures than the painting and clearly shows the tent. (The signage confirms that the soldier at left center is eating half a pie, freehand.) The printed image was likely based on a drawing now at the National Gallery of Art,
Sutler's Tent, Third Pennsylvania Cavalry. Homer evidently felt the tight cropping of the painting made a stronger composition.
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| Winslow Homer, Sutler's Tent, Third Pennsylvania Cavalry, 1862. National Gallery of Art |
The Sutler's Tent was auctioned at Sotheby's New York in 1996 for $550,000. Two years later, a large Homer seascape, Lost on the Grand Banks—which had been on loan to LACMA—was sold privately to Bill Gates. The price was reportedly over $30 million, establishing a new price level for Homer and American paintings.
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| Winslow Homer, Return of the Gleaner, 1867. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art |
Most Homer paintings have long been in East Coast museums. LACMA managed to buy a major Homer,
The Cotton Pickers, in 1977. The Huntington, which opened its American galleries in 1984, has sometimes competed against Arkansas' richly funded Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Yet even with its Walmart cash, Crystal Bridges has managed to buy only one Homer painting, and it too is a modestly scaled work of the 1860s. Based on the images, I'd say the Huntington got the more compelling picture.
The Ahmanson has designated The Sutler's Tent as a gift in honor of the nation's 250th anniversary. It will go on display in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art on Dec. 7th. There it will be a centerpiece of a room relating to the Civil War and reconstruction. Also on view will be French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Why Born Enslaved! and a signed Emancipation Proclamation from the Huntington Library's large collection of Civil War material.
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| Detail of The Sutler's Tent |
Comments
"Gleaner" also imports and translates for Americans the Barbizon theme of man against nature. That and the banded composition would come to characterize his best work after 1867, including "The Gulf Stream."
--- J. Garcin
> Bridges) is the better painting
Are we looking at the same artwork?
The face and upper part of the body don't seem well modeled. The face in particular is so tentatively done, I'd swear it's actually not been painted by Homer.
However, if "Return..." really is authentic, it must have been an off day for the guy.
LACMA has a really mediocre Homer too, the one given to the museum before the more recent one (from the 1980s, 1990s?). I believe the work shows the ocean, and the painting is so weak, it really should be treated as a study piece. Regrettably, since LACMA is a newbie, beggars can't be choosers. So maybe a weak Homer hanging next to a better Homer is better than just one Winslow alone?
The museum right now has a new listing of an upcoming impressionist show---hallelujah, it's not contemporary! Their website, however, features a work of a 2nd-tier French painter of the 19th century, which was donated to them last year. As with the Bridge's Winslow Homer, LACMA's impressionist-style painting by Jean Beraud is off---also because of not just the depiction of a face, but also what's supposed to be a metal tree guard of a Parisian street.