Prisoners from the Front

Winslow Homer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Painted in his New York studio after the war, this work was inspired by the heroism of Homer’s friend Francis Channing Barlow, a Union Army general who captured a division of Confederate soldiers at Spotsylvania, Virginia, in 1864. The artist summarized their confrontation against a ruined Southern landscape, while also implying class differences between the elegant officer in his sharp uniform and the disheveled Confederate troops. In 1869 critic Eugene Benson suggested that the painting transcended a specific event to portray the entirety of the war, noting that the prisoners represented "the elements in our Southern society that fomented and fed the rebellion against a beneficent and unaggressive Government."

The American Wing

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The American Wing's ever-evolving collection comprises some 20,000 works of art by African American, Euro American, Latin American, and Native American men and women. Ranging from the colonial to early-modern periods, the holdings include painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts—including furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, silver, metalwork, jewelry, basketry, quill and bead embroidery—as well as historical interiors and architectural fragments.

Metropolitan Museum of Art