Description
In December 1866, Winslow Homer sailed from Boston for a year of study in France. Since the early 1850s he had known the principles of French painting, particularly the outdoor style of the Barbizon school. While in France, Homer spent most of his time working in Paris and the rural village of Cernay-la-Ville in Picardy, about 40 miles from the French capital. This oil sketch was probably painted there.
Provenance
John La Farge (New York sale 1911); William Rutloff Kip; George Vigouroux, Jr. (c. 1967); Mrs. Elizabeth Whitney Evans.
Accession Number
1992.315
Medium
oil on wood
Dimensions
Framed: 30.5 x 45.5 x 4.5 cm (12 x 17 15/16 x 1 3/4 in.); Unframed: 17 x 32.2 cm (6 11/16 x 12 11/16 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Gift of Elizabeth Whitney Evans and Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting American
Background & Context
Background Story
Women Working in a Field (1867) is one of Homer's earliest treatments of women's labor—a subject that would become increasingly important in his art. The painting depicts women engaged in agricultural work—likely harvesting—.subject that connects to Homer's broader interest in the relationship between people and their environments. The year 1867 places this two years after the Civil War, when women's economic roles were being renegotiated. During the war, women had entered occupations previously reserved for men, and the post-war period saw both a return to traditional gender roles and a growing movement for women's rights. Homer's painting documents the agricultural work that women had always performed but that wartime necessity had made more visible. His treatment likely emphasizes the physical reality of farm labor—the bent postures, the weathered clothing, the implements of agricultural work—rather than idealizing or sentimentalizing the women's effort. This directness distinguishes Homer's approach from the more conventional genre paintings of rural women that emphasized domestic virtue or picturesque charm. The painting also connects to the broader 19th-century American tradition of representing labor—a subject that aligned with the democratic values of a republic that valued productive work.
Cultural Impact
Homer's paintings of women's labor influenced how American women's economic contributions were represented in art, introducing a directness that contrasted with more sentimental depictions of women's work. The paintings influenced later American realist painters who similarly depicted working women with unsentimental attention. The field labor subject influenced how American agricultural life was understood, documenting the reality that women's work was essential to the farm economy rather than supplemental.
Why It Matters
This painting matters because it demonstrates Homer's interest in representing reality as he found it—regardless of whether that reality matched social expectations. Women working in a field was not a picturesque subject in 1867; it was an economic reality that Homer recorded with the same attentive clarity he brought to all his subjects. The painting thus argues for art's capacity to make the invisible visible and the overlooked significant.
