Visit+From+The+Old+Mistress,+A

Date: 1876
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1909/1909.7.28_1a.jpg?itok=rMStcc0P width="423" height="314" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/visit-old-mistress-10737"]] ||
 * Title: **A Visit from the Old Mistress**

Artist: **Winslow Homer** Born: Boston, Massachusetts 1836 Died: Prout's Neck, Maine 1910

Medium: oil on canvas 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61.0 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of William T. Evans

Accession: 1909.7.28 || //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 the balance that the nation hoped to find in the difficult years of Reconstruction.
 * Gallery Label: **

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006


 * Suggested Questions: **
 * What is going on in this scene?
 * If this were painted in 1860, how might it be different? What might be happening?
 * If you were to divide these people into two groups, how would you divide them? Why? How does this artist divide the two groups?
 * Create a tableaux based on the painting paying special attention to their stance, eyes and how they relate to one another.
 * Why might the "old mistress" be visiting the other women? How does each group feel about the visit?
 * What do you think each character might be thinking/feeling?
 * What do you think the women hope for the young toddler/infant?

Pre-Visit Graphic Organizer Teaching Reconstruction Old Mistress Elementary Teaching American History Notes Winslow Homer's Old Mistress Resources Old Mistress in At Beck and Call A Visit from the Old Mistress - Teaching with Documents "Winslow Homer's Virginia" Virginia Historical Society Banner Lecture by Elizabeth O'Leary Was Winslow Homer....- Artsy article
 * Resources: **

Artist Biography SAAM Collections Page
 * Links: **