Rail Shooting

With the end of the Civil War in 1865, Americans struggled to find stability after nearly five years of violence and social discord. For Winslow Homer, an artist whose career had been established during the war, the peacetime transition was particularly challenging. In A Game of Croquet, Homer discovered a worthy subject from the world of popular culture, a source previously untapped by American artists...

From the beginning of Thomas Eakins’ career in the early 1870s to the present, critics and scholars have consistently remarked on the “manly” nature of the artist’s works, but never have the masculine qualities of the paintings been explained. In...