Song of the Lark, Winslow Homer

Song of the Lark, Winslow Homer (1874)

During the decades following the Civil War, Winslow Homer forged his reputation as America's foremost painter of everyday life. Homer's realist depictions of laboring farmers, rugged wilderness guides, and storm-tossed New England fishermen stressed the powerful and sometimes perilous relationship between man and nature. This relationship is at the heart of Song of the Lark, in which a young farmer enters his fields at sunrise to begin a day of reaping and is momentarily transfixed by the call of an unseen bird, creating a transcendent communion of man and the land that sustains him. Homer portrays his farmer as an heroic individual who stands firmly in his field, clutching his hat and scythe. The farmer's scythe is an interesting detail here, for by the mid-1870s American farmers had largely replaced it with Cyrus McCormick's more efficient mechanical reaper. By depicting his farmer with a scythe, Homer nostalgically alludes to an earlier, simpler era in American farm life, when rugged individuals worked their land manually and alone.