Disillusionment and Nostalgia

In the mid 18th century, the Civil War wracked the United States, shaking many of the accepted social, economic, and cultural norms of the day. The uncertainty and change that followed the war filtered down through every layer of civilization, leaving its mark. The mark it left on art, and specifically painting is distinct and unmistakable. While the styles or technique of the post-civil-war paintings are not necessarily different, the content and subject matter definitely reflect the shifts that the war set in motion. By crumbling the norms of the day, the war produced deep disillusionment. The horror and brutality that mankind was capable of lay fresh in everyone's memory, and the fleetingness of life and loyalties were motifs that ran through much of the following artwork. The war also brought nostalgia, wistful yearning for the idealized innocence of the past. Themes of agriculture, landscape, and childhood often show up to represent the nostalgia for what was fading. While these two things seem to oppose each other, one looking longingly to the past, the other aware of the sharp edges of the future, however, in paintings, they combine to create haunting and rich pictures; art containing layers of the new found revelations, wrapped in the warm ideals of the past virtues.

Winslow Homer Veteran in a New Field, 1865, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,  67.187.131

Winslow Homer was one of the most famous civil war and post civil war artists of the day. He had often worked on the front lines, capturing scenes for magazines and newspapers back home. When Reconstruction started, he began working on more stand-alone pieces. His paintings with motifs of sentimentality and disillusionment are numerous and clear. In this work, as the title states, a lone man is bent, harvesting his field. The scythe he wields can represent the weapon of the Grim Reaper or death, but the harvest he is gathering in shows optimism for the future and a fresh start, for even an old Civil War veteran returned home.

Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream, 1899, Oil on Canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection,  06.1234

This painting is another famous one by Winslow Homer. Although the content has no specific ties to the war, similar themes can be found. A black man reclines on a sail-less, rudderless boat, surrounded by harassing sharks and limitless ocean. He stares determinedly  at a tornado that threatens him from the left,  but remains oblivious to the hope of a schooner on the right horizon. For this man, the future looks bleak and dangerous, the ocean is no longer a beautiful glass to sail upon, it is a battlefield that may take all his strength to survive. The position of the black man as the hero of the painting is also germane to the charged racial issues that surrounded the war.

John Steuart Curry Tornado Over Kansas, 1929, Oil on Canvas,  Muskegon Museum of Art,  1935.4

While not painted until almost half a century later, Tornado Over Kansas contains many familiar themes, repercussions of the war that the country was still dealing with. The scene opens on a simple farmyard in the mid-west as the family flees to safety from a looming tornado. The father stands strong, the first to defend and the first to fall, outlined against the sky as he assures the security of his family who skirt around him frightened as the head down into the storm cellar. Just as the Civil War shattered the established norms, the storm on the horizon threatening their home, their agrarian way of life, and in fact, all life as they know it.

Eastman Johnson The Girl I left Behind Me, 1875, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

This painting is a perfect example of the tension between nostalgia and disillusionment in post- civil war paintings. A young girl stands alone on a windswept cliff overlooking a cloudy seascape. Her cloak is dark as in mourning, and an underskirt of red trails to the ground like dripping blood. Her youthful face and loose hair show innocence and purity. With the elements in a mounting storm before her, she holds her ground against whatever may befall, waiting perhaps, for her father’s boat to return. Here, the use of nature and youth as symbols are easy to pick out, and the viewer is left to wonder which will cave first, strong virtue of the past, or the harsh winds of the future.

Winslow Homer Snap the Whip, 1873, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum Art, 50.41

On a sunny day, eight boys engage in a rousing game on their schoolyard lawn. In this painting Winslow Homer uses a simple country scene to relate to many of the struggles and concerns facing the post-war nation. Freshly released from lessons, these youths are full of vigor and innocence. The whole scene calls to mind sentiment for the nation's fading agrarian past. All these things are seamlessly tied together with the themes of disillusionment in other parts of the canvas. The boys are all dressed in countrified attire, but wear suspenders and caps symbolizing the new responsibilities of manhood thrust upon them while the older men are at war. Additionally, the boys on the left, flung to the ground by their game could represent the fragility of life on the front, the mowing down of soldiers on a charge. The whole painting beautifully ties together the recurring themes of post war painting, harsh disillusionment and idealizing nostalgia, in a way that bridges the gap and helps to heal the wounds.