Winslow Homer, Prisoners From the Front (1866)

...all of his Civil War work carries the flavor and conviction of actuality.


Homer's painting made sense, as no other painted image did in the same degree, of the fundamental issues of that conflict. It did so because he discarded the conventional subjects of battle paintings or modes of heroic typification for a prosaic encounter between two (so far as most of his critics were concerned) anonymous figures, and because he framed and explained his subject by devices of psychological and sociological analysis that are counterparts in their modernity to the modernity of the subject they were used to describe and thus peculiarly fitted to its elucidation. Contemporary critics did not use these terms, of course, but they repeatedly commented both upon the psychological relations between the two officers, and the regional and social differences which they so clearly exemplified.

--Cikovsky

Link to essays:
C. Colbert, Winslow Homer's "Prisoners From the Front" (1998)
Nicolai Cikovsky, Winslow Homer's "Prisoners From the Front" (1977)



He was an unusual general, slight of build with a peaceful, boyish face, colorless cheeks without a typical general's beard, and a thin voice. He dressed informally, often wearing a "checked flannel lumberjack shirt"^[1] under an unbuttoned uniform coat. (Wikipedia on Francis Channing Barlow)



...Colonel Theodore Lyman, who happened to be Barlow's classmate
at Harvard (Class of 1855), told of his first encounter
with Barlow in the army: "As we stood under a big
cherry tree, a strange figure approached; he looked like
a highly independent mounted newsboy; he was attired
in a flannel checked shirt; a threadbare pair of trousers,
and an old blue kepi; from his waist hung a big cavalry
sabre....It was General Barlow."

--Cikovsky