CC0 · no rights reserved
A Visit from the Old Mistress
From the collection of Smithsonian American Art Museum. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
About this work
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.
Smithsonian American Art Museum’s own descriptionSubjects
Credit lineA Visit from the Old Mistress. 1876. Winslow Homer, born Boston, MA 1836-died Prout's Neck, ME 1910. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans. CC0.
