A Visit from the Old Mistress

About this artwork

A Visit from the Old Mistress captures a tentative encounter in the postwar South. The freed slaves are no longer obliged to greet their former mistress with welcoming gestures, and one remains seated as she would not have been allowed to do before the war. Winslow Homer composed the work from sketches he had made while traveling through Virginia; it conveys a silent tension between two communities seeking to understand their future. The formal equivalence between the standing figures suggests t...

Art Historical Context

**A Visit from the Mistress** (1876) by Winslow Homer captures a moment in the American South during the Reconstruction era, just over a decade after the Civil ended slavery. Painted in oil, this realist masterpiece depicts a tense encounter between newly freed African American women inside a modest cabin and their former white mistress standing at the open door. Homer, renowned for his unflinching portrayals of life, drew from sketches made during his travels through Virginia infusing the scene with raw authenticity. The composition highlights a subtle shift in power dynamics: one Black woma...

About the Artist

Winslow Homer · 1836–1910

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was one of America's greatest painters and a preeminent figure in 19th-century American art. Largely self-taught, Homer began his career as a commercial illustrator and Civil War correspondent for Harper's Weekly before becoming renowned for his powerful marine subjects and landscape paintings. His mastery of both oil and watercolor, combined with his uncompromising reali...