Cleveland Museum of Art

The Brierwood Pipe

Winslow Homer

Date

1864

Medium

oil on canvas

Culture

America

Department

American Painting and Sculpture

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

Created during the United States Civil War, Winslow Homer’s painting depicts two volunteers for the Union Army who sport their regiment’s highly colorful uniforms, a design discovered to be impractical due to its ability to be spotted by sharpshooters. Passing idle time in their encampment, one soldier holds a lit pipe and watches his companion whittle a block of wood. The painting shares its title with a contemporary poem, in which a soldier smokes a brierwood pipe and daydreams of the time when the conflict will end so he can return home. The museum acquired this painting during World War II, and it seems likely that the painting’s subject was viewed as especially significant for its wartime audience. During the Civil War, Homer worked as an artist-reporter for the New York newspaper Harper's Weekly .

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