“Song of the Lark”
For today, a painting from the great American genre painter, Winslow Homer.
“Song of the Lark” (great name!) is an oil on canvas painting by the American artist, Winslow Homer, from 1876. This piece is also sometimes referred to as “In the Fields”.
In this painting, Homer depicts a young man walking into a field to start his hard day of work. He is carrying a scythe in his right arm and a sun hat in his left hand. He looks up to the left towards the sky and what the viewer can safely assume is the lark who is singing its melodic song. The early morning sky is dappled with clouds tinged slightly pink from the newly risen sun. The wheat in the field is in mid-motion, bending in the unseen wind.
During the 1870s, Homer painted mostly rural life ways in an almost idyllic manner. Both Homer and the United States as a whole were still recovering from the brutal American Civil War. There was an overall feeling of nostalgia and desire for simpler times sweeping the nation as people grappled with how to move forward after the atrocities of war and a near dissolution of the union.
At the time this was painted, the scythe was slowly being replaced by the mechanical reaper, an advent of the industrial revolution. Homer’s choice to depict the scythe hearkens back to simpler times. The farmer is depicted as strong, independent, and self-reliant. He is the quintessential American self-made hardworking man who is almost heroic in his steadfastness.
“Song of the Lark” is currently in the collections of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, in the United States.
For more on Winslow Homer, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
