1864
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
The Brierwood Pipe is a 1864 unspecified by Winslow Homer, a American Folk Art work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see two Union soldiers in bright blue and red uniforms sitting in a tent. One smokes a pipe; the other carves wood. The uniforms were real—too flashy for war. Sharpshooters could pick them off easily. Homer painted this in 1864, while the Civil War still raged. The title comes from a poem about soldiers daydreaming of home. Look up more paintings of America, American next.
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…
During the Civil War, Homer worked as an artist-reporter for the New York newspaper Harper's Weekly .
Read the full account in the museum source.
Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects.
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