2025-01 Raynors Historical Collectible Auctions
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 1/25/2025
Each wood cut print is full page, 16” x 11-1/2, withdrawn from Harper’s Weekly with minor loss to margin (can matted out). The first "The Army of the Potomac - A Sharp-Shooter On Picket Duty" published November 15, 1862. The sharpness of the solder's eye and the accuracy of his air are heroized in this composition. He is seen from surprisingly close up, as if the viewer were sitting on a nearby limb. Signed in the plate “Homer”. This 1863 painting by Winslow Homer, thought to be his earliest completed effort in oil paints, is now housed at the Portland Museum of Art,.Homer painted “Sharpshooter” after spending two months in the spring of 1862 at Yorktown, Va., during the Civil War. He was producing illustrations for Harper’s Weekly and had obtained permission to mingle in camp with Union soldiers during the month-long siege there. Homer never fired a shot during the war. But an account he gave to a friend more than three decades later helps us understand why he wanted to depict this subject.. “I looked through one of their rifles once when they were in a peach orchard in front of Yorktown in April, 1862,” Homer wrote to his friend George Briggs, in 1896. ... plus, Holiday in Camp--Soldiers Playing "FOOTBALL" [Sketched by Winslow Homer], July 15, 1865,. This print pre-dates what is considered to be the first American football game was played on November 6, 1869, between Rutgers and Princeton, two college teams.
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