Dressing for the Carnival
| Dressing for the Carnival | |
|---|---|
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Dressing for the Carnival is an 1877 painting by the American painter, printmaker and illustrator Winslow Homer.
Homer painted
Reconstruction after the American Civil War
. The 1870s and 1880s produced innumerable images of African Americans at carnival time, mindless, jolly, condescending.
But Homer's Dressing for the Carnival is unlike all of them: a deeply nuanced and, in the end, tragic scene of preparation for festivity. A group of people is preparing for the African-American festival known in the South as the Mason-Dixon line. Next to her, but apart from her, gazing at the vesting ceremony with wonder, are some children, one of whom holds a Stars and Stripes (for by Reconstruction, the rituals of the Fourth of July had been overlaid on those of Jonkonnu). Homer makes us sense how far the hopes of emancipation still are from the realities of black life in the South.[1]
References
- ^ Robert Hughes, American Visions, The Epic History of Art in America, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006