Near Andersonville

This short book operates like a detective novella about the provenance and interpretation of a little-known painting by Winslow Homer. Titled, now, Near Andersonville (1865–1866), the painting was unknown for almost one hundred years after its composition and remained obscure for a couple of decades after its discovery in the 1960s. Peter H. Wood persuasively speculates that the painting's obscurity was enhanced when it was donated to an art museum in Newark, New Jersey, around the time of the Newark riots with the misleading title Captured Liberators. It was not until a retrospective of Homer's Civil War paintings was mounted in San Francisco in the late 1980s that the original title was unearthed. A host of interpretive possibilities emerged with that title, and Wood takes full advantage of them. For Civil War historians, Georgia's Andersonville prison remains a notoriously abusive space where tens of thousands of Union soldiers were crowded into a muddy field rife with typhoid. It is speculated that during the summer of 1864 four prisoners died of this disease every hour. Photographs of survivors after the war resemble the emaciated inmates of concentration camps. These photographs contributed to the public uproar that surrounded the trial of the camp's commander, who was later executed

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Novella · Painting · Prison · Spanish Civil War · American History and Culture · History · Philosophy