Defiance, Inviting a Shot before Petersburg

SAMUEL WHITE’S modest monument to the “faithful slaves” of Fort Mill, South Carolina, with its little list of names meant to lift the former chattel out of historical oblivion, alerts us to one final, but decisive, shift in the history of nineteenth-century public monuments. This was the great enlargement of the commemorative sphere to...

Winslow Homer was a painter. He thought of himself as a painter and directed his greatest efforts toward this art form. Whether with oils or watercolors, he sought to push his painting to address large themes, and did so in a vocabulary that broke from many American traditions. As an artist devoted to the world as it is, he saw painting as an effort not only to record a particular place and time,...