Skirmish in the Wilderness

Artist Winslow Homer (American, 1836 - 1910)

Date1864

MediumOil on canvas mounted on Masonite

Dimensions18 x 26 1/4 in. (45.7 x 66.7 cm)
Frame Dimension: 25 1/2 × 35 1/2 × 3 1/4 in. (64.8 × 90.2 × 8.3 cm)

ClassificationsOil Painting

Credit LineHarriet Russell Stanley Fund

Terms

Object number1944.05

DescriptionThe dominant object in "Skirmish in the Wilderness" is the great tree, a giant of the forest,that rises at the center of the canvas. Homer detailed its majesty, carefully giving its massive trunk solidity and weight. He also constructed the scene so that the only ray of bright light to fall anywhere in view highlights the tree, clearly distinguishing its individual form and character. In his casting of the tree as hero, Homer fashioned this work as an American counterpart of the worship of the natural world that French painters had for decades instituted in their depictions of the forests of Barbizon and Fontainebleau.(1) Even his green-brown palette and heavy application of paint echo the manner of the earlier French works, which were eagerly collected in Boston at mid-century.(2)
But "Skirmish in the Wilderness" is not merely a painting of nature. It is also a painting of war and works in conjunction with its title to emphasize that fact (not surprisingly, given his early career as an illustrator, Homer's often sly titles are key to a full understanding of his work). "Wilderness" indicates both the untamed nature of the depicted landscape--a forest interior thick with bracken and underbrush--and a site in eastern Virginia where a particularly brutal Civil War battle took place.
A participant recalled this Battle of the Wilderness, fought on May 5-6, 1864:
The strangest and most undescribable battle in history… which no man saw, and in which artillery was useless and hardly used at all. A battle fought in dense woods and tangled brake, where maneuvering was impossible, where the lines of battle were invisible to their commanders, and whose position could only be determined by the rattle and roll and flash of musketry, and where the enemy was also invisible.(3)
This battle was the first encounter between the forces of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, the newly appointed lieutenant general in charge of all the Union armies. Grant was hoping to engage Lee on open land on his way to Richmond, the Confederate capital. Lee, however, aware of Grant's superior numbers of troops and greater artillery power, forced the confrontation where these advantages would be minimized: in the Wilderness, a mining region "of gloom and the shadow of death" where "a dense undergrowth of low-limbed and scraggy pines, stiff and bristling chinkapins, scrub-oaks and hazel" had grown up.(4) Unable to coordinate the actions of the troops and their artillery, the two armies devolved into pockets of vicious combat. One of the horrific elements of the engagement were brush fires, apparently sparked by gunfire, that trapped and burned alive those, such as the wounded, who were unable to flee. At the end of the two days, more than 25,000 men were killed, wounded, or missing.(5)
Homer is reported to have said that "Skirmish in the Wilderness" grew from sketches he made while traveling with the Union army at the time of the battle.(6) Later scholars have not been able to verify Homer's 1864 trip to the Virginia front, but two pencil studies in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York that are closely related to the New Britain painting seem to reveal the quickness and intensity of sketches made in the press of events.(7) And the painting itself--with its largely undifferentiated masses of men at the right, its billows of smoke from rifle fire from those men and from the Confederate position at the top of the hill at the left, and its indecorously posed wounded in the foreground--seems to signal a sight seen rather than imagined.
Homer did, in fact, have a personal connection to one of the Union leaders of the Battle of the Wilderness. Brigadier General Francis Channing Barlow, a friend and distant cousin, with whom Homer had stayed when he visited the Army of the Potomac in 1862, played a major role in those two days. The First Division of the Second Corps, which he commanded, captured an entire division of Confederate soldiers and two generals. The officer striding in from the right, as summarily painted as he is, nonetheless clearly carries a long cavalry sword (as did Barlow) and wears a cap with a red dot (which could symbolize the red cloverleaf insignia of the Second Corps).(8)
"Skirmish in the Wilderness" is a singular painting in Homer's oeuvre. As a painter of war, the artist was principally concerned with moments of quiet--men entertaining themselves in camp, sitting watchfully around a campfire, lounging in the sunlight. Even when face-to-face with the enemy, the figures in Homer's paintings experience conflict, either individually (as in "Inviting a Shot before Petersburg"[1864; Detroit Institute of Arts]) or psychologically (as in "Prisoners From the Front" [1866; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]). "Skirmish", on the other hand, depicts armies joined in battle. Noise fills the scene. Volleys of gunfire send thunderous roars between the hills. The cries of men and individual shots combine in a confusing wall of sound. In none of his other paintings of the 1860s and 1870s does Homer try to depict such violence and chaos. Not until he turns to the sea as a subject in the 1880s does he again invoke a comparable level of noise and unbridled aggression--and then, of course, it is nature, not man, that provides the sound and the fury.

MS

NOTES:
. This strategy is more radical than that adopted in the somewhat comparable painting, also of 1864, called "Waverly Oaks" (Thyssen-Bornemizsa Museum, Madrid), in which Homer, through the title and the scale, centers attention on the trees of a park near his family's home in Belmont, Massachusetts.
2. Alexandra R. Murphy, "French Paintings in Boston: 1800-1900," in "Corot to Braque: French Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts", Boston, exhib. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1979), pp. xvi-xlvi.
3. Robert Stoddard Robertson, "From the Wilderness to Spottsylvania" (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1888), pp. 18-19; quoted by Sally Mills, in Marc Simpson, et al., "Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War", exhib. cat. (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Bedford Arts, 1988), p. 175.
4. William Swinton, "Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac" (New York: C. B. Richardson, 1866; reprint, New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1882), pp. 428-29; quoted in ibid.
5. E. B. Long, "The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac", 1861-1865 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971), p. 494.
6. C. B. Curtis, manuscript catalogue, Union League Club Library, New York.
7. Acc. nos. 1912-12-108v, 1912-12-171.
8. Nicolai Ciokovky Jr., "Winslow Homer's Prisoners from the Front," "Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal" 12 (1977): 164 n. 36.

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