September 22, 2011
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/22/2011
Newspaper, Harpers Weekly, November 15, 1862, 16pp., complete issue, disbound. From the interior, Winslow Homer's most important War Date wood-cut engraving, "The Army of the Potomac - A Sharp-Shooter On Picket Duty" In the words of the National Gallery of Art, “The subject of this engraving is based on Homer's first oil painting. An emblematic image of the Civil War, the lone figure of a sharpshooter reveals the changing nature of modern warfare. With new, mass-produced weapons such as rifled muskets, killing became distant, impersonal, and efficiently deadly. Despite public admiration for sharpshooters' skill, ordinary soldiers looked upon them as cold-blooded, mechanical killers. Many years after the war, Homer wrote an old friend, "I looked through one of their rifles once....The...impression struck me as being as near murder as anything I could think of in connection with the army and I always had a horror of that branch of the service."
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