On Guard

In Winslow Homer’s On Guard, a country boy clad in a smock and oversized straw hat gazes across the fields toward distant woods from which several crows rise into the bright but clouded sky. Perched atop a sun-gilded rustic fence of stone and brush, the boy grasps the end of a homemade banner, a slender stick with a scrap of red fabric tied to the end. His expression is hidden from view, but his still profile and two fists tight around the stick express tense anticipation. Homer’s title does not specify the nature of the threat against which he stands guard duty. In 1868 the artist redrew the figure in an abbreviated composition published as an illustration for a poem entitled “Watching the Crows.” On Guard, however, was painted during the final, desperate year of the American Civil War, by which time many boys had assumed the tasks of absent or slain fathers. Homer’s contemporaries undoubtedly viewed the young guard as a sentinel on the lookout for the enemy. The tension of the boy’s posture, heightened by the confining vertical format of the composition, suggests an expectation of imminent menace signaled by the airborne crows. A mere annoyance in Homer’s later illustration Watching the Crows, here the birds testify to the disturbance caused by advancing troops on the ground below.

Homer painted On Guard in his first years of painting in oils, during which he was preoccupied with the wartime themes that also dominated his work as an artist-reporter for the popular press. Homer generally portrayed the war in terms of the daily life of soldiers; this painting was a rare excursion into the war's effect on civilian life. It was also Homer's first painting of a child, anticipating his intense immersion in the theme of rural youth in the late 1860s and throughout the 1870s. Homer's typical images of boys and girls, such as the Terra Foundation's Three Boys on the Shore (TF 1999.75) and Apple Picking (TF 1992.7), are idylls of rural life that capitalized on the contemporary popularity of childhood as a metaphor for national regeneration in the wake of the war. Nonetheless, Homer's children often evince something of the precocious watchfulness and guarded reserve of the boy in On Guard, who, caught up in war, has forfeited his childish innocence.

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Regard sur Winslow Homer (Winslow Homer at a Glance), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–September 24, 1995.

Attitudes Toward Nature, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, September 30, 1995–April 21, 1996.

Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 1996.

Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, April 12–June 22, 1997.

Collection Cameo companion piece, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, June 1999.

New Faces, New Places: Recent Additions to the Terra Foundation for the Arts Collection, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, October 14–December 31, 2000.

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American Classics: Selections from the Terra Foundation for the Arts, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 26–September 1, 2002.

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Deux collections en regard: oeuvres de la Terra Foundation for the Arts et du Detroit Institute of Arts (Side by Side: Works from the Terra Foundation for the Arts and the Detroit Institute of Arts), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, March 2–June 1, 2003. [exh. cat.]

Copley to Cassatt: Masterworks from the Terra Collection, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, and Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, September 5–December 7, 2003.

A Narrative of American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, February 13–October 31, 2004.

Expanded Galleries of American Art with Loans from the Terra Foundation for American Art Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, April 15, 2005–February 2008.

Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light,  The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, February 16–May 11, 2008. [exh. cat.]

Galleries of American Art with Loans from the Terra Foundation for American Art Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, June 2008–September 2013.

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North, Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois and The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois (organizers). Venue: The Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, September 26, 2013–March 24, 2014. [exh. cat.]

Galleries of American Art with Loans from the Terra Foundation for American Art Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, April 2014–June 2018.

Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, New Brunswick, Maine (organizer). Venue: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, June 23–October 28, 2018.

Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865–1945, Art Institute of Chicago and Terra Foundation for American Art (organizers). Venue:  Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, China, September 28, 2018–January 6, 2019.   [exh. cat.]

Galleries of American Art with loans from the Terra Foundation for American Art Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, May 2019–present.

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Side by Side: Works from the Terra Foundation for the Arts and the Detroit Institute of Arts. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2003. Text p. 11; ill. p. 10 (color).

Deux collections en regard: oeuvres de la Terra Foundation for the Arts et du Detroit Institute of Arts. (exh. cat., Musée d'Art Américain Giverny). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 2003. Text p. 11; ill. p. 10 (color).

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