A Newly Discovered Drawing of Sharpshooters by Winslow Homer

Abstract

Close collaboration enables an art historian and paper conservator to attribute a hitherto-unknown Civil War drawing of Berdan Sharpshooters at Yorktown to Winslow Homer. Contrasts between this drawing and other Homer illustrations for Harper’s Weekly during the Yorktown Campaign of 1862 shed new light on the issue of wartime censorship. The drawing’s relationship to other Civil War work by Homer, in particular his first oil, Sharpshooter (1863), and a much later sketch illustrating the artist-correspondent’s perception of sharpshooters at Yorktown as murderers, also shows as never before the profound effect of this wartime experience on his work.