By Rick and Victoria Britton
This sketch connects two prominent individuals of the Civil War era: Union Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery Meigs, who one author called “possibly the most important bureaucrat in American history,” and Winslow Homer, the gifted artist whose wartime newspaper illustrations captured the imagination of the public. “Mr. Homer is the first of our artists,” wrote a reviewer in 1863. His work is “signed all over with truth.”
Born in Boston, Mass., in 1836, Homer taught himself art. His mother, Henrietta Maria née Benson, an accomplished watercolorist, became a consequential first influence, passing along her talents to young “Win” as the family called him. The middle son of three, Winslow Homer grew up loving the great outdoors, an appreciation that inspired his later oil and watercolor canvases.
At 19, Homer commenced a two-year apprenticeship with Boston lithographer J.H. Bufford. Though he quickly mastered the medium, producing art for sheet music, books, and magazines, he later likened the experience to slavery. In 1857, on his twenty-first birthday, Homer declared himself independent. “From the time I took my nose off that lithographic stone,” he later wrote, “I have had no master, and never shall have any.”
From a rented studio in the Ballou Publishing House building on Boston’s Winter Street, Homer began a freelance illustration career that spanned 20 years.
“From the time I took my nose off that lithographic stone,” he later wrote, “I have had no master, and never shall have any.”
—Winslow Homer, 1857
Homer’s first freelance pieces appeared in Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, and later New York City’s Harper’s Weekly illustrated newspaper. Lively social scenes of bewhiskered men sporting top hats and canes and stylish women dressed in flowing hoop skirts dominated the subject matter.
For publication, newspaper staff reproduced the original illustrations as woodcut engravings. For this process, an artist copied the picture in reverse on the clean white paint of a polished block of boxwood or American maple. Next, an engraver cut away the white surface. The lines left behind approximated the original drawing. Biographer Lloyd Goodrich noted that Homer “almost always drew directly” onto the whitewashed wood but “never cut a block himself” during this period.
Meanwhile, reproductions of photographs appeared with increasing frequency in publications. Commercial photography had been around for almost 20 years, but a faithful reproduction of photographs (via the halftone process) was two decades in the future. During this interval, photographs were, like illustrations, transformed into wood engravings for printing.
Homer, always interested in more work, copied portraits from photographs for Ballou’s and Harper’s. Goodrich wrote that Homer, now working out of New York City, signed these sketches “simply ‘H’, evidently not being proud of this hack work.” Art historian Gordon Hendricks disagreed with this assessment. “The artist sketching from a photograph need not worry about his subject fidgeting,” he wrote, but there were still a multitude of decisions “which must be made from talent, experience, and taste.”
By the time the nation’s secession crisis began in December 1860, Homer had established himself as a much-in-demand newspaper illustrator.
An illustration from this period highlights his use of portrait photography. In “The Seceding Mississippi Delegation in Congress,” the cover of the Feb. 2, 1861, edition of Harper’s Weekly, Homer incorporated Mathew Brady photographs into a montage of secession leaders.
The bulk of Homer’s wartime illustrations did not utilize photography. Harper’s editors made extensive use of his talents, commissioning him to cover President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, and, after hostilities began, as one of several special artists dispatched to document the camps and campaigns of the Army of the Potomac. Homer and his fellow illustrators shared the soldiers’ lives and illustrated what they witnessed—both the momentous and the mundane—and sent their sketches to the newspaper every week. Goodrich noted, however, that Homer was present on the ground “for only a brief period. He made several trips to the front and saw some fighting, but he was not stationed permanently with the armies.” Most of his Civil War-related pieces were executed in New York City.
Homer created this image of Montgomery Cunningham Meigs from a carte de visite produced by well-known Philadelphia photographer Frederick Gutekunst. Homer faithfully copied the angle of Meigs’s head, wrinkles on his frock coat, and the unbuttoned lower button in the leftmost grouping of three (a grouping that’s significant because it indicates his rank as major general, a brevet grade Meigs attained in July 1864).
Born in Georgia in 1816, Meigs graduated from West Point in 1836 and joined the Army Corps of Engineers. During the antebellum period, he supervised the construction of the Washington Aqueduct as well as the wings and dome of the U.S. Capitol. Talented and hardworking, Meigs remained in the Union Army when war came, rising quickly in rank. In May 1861, he received a brigadier general’s commission and an assignment as Quartermaster General, charged with logistics for the U.S. Army. Meigs and his staff procured and delivered everything the soldiers needed to keep them fed and fighting. A fellow quartermaster later remarked that history provided few, if any, examples “of armies so great traversing territories so wide and having their every want at every step supplied.” In 1864, Meigs ordered the burial of Union dead on Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Arlington property, which had been confiscated by the federal government. In the 1880s, he designed the Pension Building in Washington D.C. Meigs died in 1892 and was interred at Arlington in a sarcophagus of his own design.
Homer executed the Meigs sketch with graphite pencil on paper, which he commonly did during the war. The paper has a smooth texture and a slightly brownish hue due to exposure to air and the passage of time. In areas with breaks or tears at the edges, the inner color is lighter than the surface. Mounted onto an art board, the drawing measures 18-by-13.5 inches. The cutout in the lower left-hand corner is 5-inches wide by 3.5-inches tall (a curious feature that, nonetheless, is not unique to this Homer piece. Cursive writing on the back reads: “3 cols. S.S.” (an abbreviation of “3 columns side-to-side”). Both these characteristics—the cutout and the inscription—point to the illustration’s purpose. It was created for the newspaper trade. The “3 columns” shorthand gave the engraver the width of the woodblock, while the cutout showed the typographer where the text could intrude onto the illustration’s frame.
Additionally, 10 pinholes dot the sketch’s outer edges. These show where pushpins held the image in place as it was transferred onto a woodblock for an engraver to work his magic. It’s possible that the engraver was New York City-based Alexander Hay Ritchie (1822-1895), a Scottish-born artist who was one of the finest engravers and printmakers of the mid-19th century. (An online engraving bearing Ritchie’s name features the same angle of Meigs’s head and the same arrangement of buttons and wrinkles.) An 1841 immigrant to the U.S., Ritchie focused on historical and allegorical subjects. He and his son, George A.H. Ritchie, who was also an artist, engraver, and printmaker, were close friends and colleagues of Homer.
It is currently not known where the engraving of this sketch appeared. Both Homer and Ritchie were prolific. And Meigs was newsworthy long after the Civil War ended. In 1882, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the seizure of the Arlington Estate had been illegal, and Meigs’s late-1880s red-brick design of the D.C. Pension Building was controversial, earning it the derisive nickname “Meigs’s Old Red Barn.” The list of periodicals that might have run the image, therefore, is more than one dozen titles long, and features the nation’s largest newspapers and magazines, including Ballou’s Pictorial, Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, The Galaxy, Our Young Folks, Harper’s Bazar, Appleton’s Journal, and The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine.
Homer’s story as an artist can be divided into two chapters. His first, as a graphic designer and illustrator, catapulted him to prominence with Harper’s during the war. By 1875, he had become our nation’s most popular illustrator. The second dates to 1883. Living an almost hermit-like existence overlooking the Atlantic at Prout’s Neck, Maine, he created hundreds of oils and watercolors depicting mountains, wildlife, children, huntsmen, fishermen, beachgoers, and most importantly—the sea. When Homer died in 1910 from a heart attack, he was America’s most celebrated painter.
References: Robert O’Harrow Jr., “A Soul on Fire,” Washington Post Magazine, July, 3, 2011; Robert M. Poole, “American Original,” National Geographic, December 1998; Johns, Winslow Homer; The Nature of Observation; Goodrich, Winslow Homer; Hendricks, The Life and Work of Winslow Homer; O’Harrow Jr., The Quartermaster; Beam, Winslow Homer’s Magazine Engravings.
Rick and Victoria Britton are award-winning writers living in Charlottesville, Va.
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