An intimately scaled project at only eighty-eight pages of text interspersed with a number of illustrations, Peter H. Wood’s “Near Andersonville”: Winslow Homer’s Civil War is an immensely readable investigation of Winslow Homer’s 1865–66 painting of the same title. Wood introduces Near Andersonville—a modest oil on canvas depicting a monumental, black female figure standing in the doorway of a rough-hewn domestic structure and gazing solemnly out toward a line of Federal soldiers being led away by their Confederate captors—as one of Homer’s least-known paintings. Suggesting it also to be one of his more misunderstood, or, at least, underappreciated works, Wood devotes his full attention to this painting in a narrative that adeptly weaves biography, military history, and visual analysis into an engaging detective story that aims to solve the mysteries the painting holds. A historian who embraces art-historical methods, Wood approaches Near Andersonville on slightly different terms in each of three chapters. He considers the painting first as a canvas, a material entity with its own life history; secondly, within the highly charged context of troubled race relations in which it was conceived and produced; and finally, in visual terms, meticulously observing the painting’s details and offering his fresh interpretations. Questions that continually drive the narrative—and seemingly, Wood’s own curiosity—are: What has this canvas experienced over its 145-year lifetime? How and why did Homer come to paint this likely enslaved Southern woman? Who is this woman, and what could be occupying her grave thoughts? What meanings could the painting’s imagery have held for the artist, for different viewers over the years, and for those today?

The book adopts the nearly identical format of another of Wood’s publications on Homer’s work, Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). As the distinguished scholar selected to deliver the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures, Wood introduced his ideas about Near Andersonville at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Currently directed and curated by Karen C. C. Dalton, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute is, significantly, home to the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive, a resource dedicated to the systematic investigation and documentation of how people of African descent have been represented in visual media. It was Dalton with whom Wood joined forces to produce the 1988–89 exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years, opening at the Menil Collection in Houston, TX, and traveling to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (Peter H. Wood and Karen C. C. Dalton, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). This collaboration with Dalton provided Wood with his first opportunity to investigate Homer’s Near Andersonville, to which he now returns almost twenty years later with his focused and greatly elaborated investigation.

A master storyteller, Wood first captivates his reader with a tale of the painting’s life history, complete with intrigue, suspense, and surprise, and delivered with the style and cadence of the spoken word, which is not surprising given the original format of his work. In the effort to recover missing pieces of the painting’s circuitous travels from the artist’s easel to the hands of a determined young Gideonite, passing through the homes of a number of family members only to be conscripted to the attic of a wealthy banker before finally reemerging from obscurity only recently to settle on the walls of the Newark Museum in New Jersey, Wood’s story unfolds through the diaries, letters, family gossip, and guesswork of the major players in this theater. Gliding seamlessly from this drama into Homer’s biography and professional career, Wood reveals himself as a judicious historian, locating the artist and his work in an abolitionist-oriented Boston, on the front lines, and in the post-Civil War American South. In a well-researched narrative, Wood delivers details about the most terrifying and devastating events of the war—the deadly prison camp at Andersonville, GA; General Grant’s utterly failed experiment known as “the Crater” at Petersburg, VA; and General Stoneman’s disastrous raid on Macon, GA—appealing to the reader’s emotions by focusing on the tremendous sacrifice of humanity. One cannot help but be affected by the alarming statistics estimating four deaths per hour in the disease- and cruelty-ridden prison camp, testimony about piles of corpses on battlefields “slippery with blood” (55), and the haunting cries of wounded soldiers, particularly those cries of black soldiers, which were quieted “by a bayonet thrust” (50).

Wood’s attention to the experiences and perspectives of blacks parallels his engagement with Homer, whom Wood presents as having a rare interest in exploring the complex thoughts and emotions of blacks during this time of national crisis. Wood describes the uncertainty many black men and women felt about the war, incorporating Frederick Douglass’ explanation that, “The South was fighting to take slavery out of the Union, and the North to keep it in the Union . . . both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro” (58). Concluding that most enslaved blacks could not predict what kind of future the end of the war would bring for them, Wood finds Homer able to capture this emotional ambiguity in his paintings of black figures, particularly in the details of Near Andersonville. To examine this complexity, Wood offers a comprehensive visual analysis of the painting, focusing on the central figure’s gaze, clothing, body, architectural surroundings, landscape, and position in the composition. Because Wood offers a thorough contextual history in the book’s first chapters, most of his readings of the imagery are solidly grounded and strongly supported. Readers will likely find compelling associations between abolition and the painted figure’s Phrygian cap-like head covering, her Garibaldi blouse, the mudsill on which she stands, the diverging paths at her feet, and particularly the gourds that surround her. Some, however, might be less accepting of Wood’s more tenuous interpretations of the planks in the platform as a political reference, the “inexplicable” wrinkles in the apron as a suggestion of pregnancy (80), Homer’s color palette as signaling mixed-race ancestry, and the figure’s evocation of the Biblical figure, Hagar.

Wood himself acknowledges his speculation, referring to one idea or another as a “hypothesis” (82), “far-fetched” (79), or “a considerable leap” (64), predicting the reader’s skepticism in his conversational tone: “‘Not possible,’ you might say” (79). But it is this very tone—inviting, humorous, warm—that reels us in again, making us wish to be persuaded, even if we remain unconvinced. And even if one were convinced, it is not always clear how these readings advance his arguments. But Wood nonetheless raises important possibilities, if not certainties, about the painting’s history and content, clearly enjoying his work in the process. Along the way, he cheerfully shares with us his gardening habits, his cuisine, and, most importantly, his vivid affection and respect for Homer and his painted figure. We see he has gained a friend in them both, and we are welcomed to join in these friendships.

Appearing just at the dawn of the Civil War Sesquicentennial, Wood’s “Near Andersonville” is part of a greater body of work that participates in the reconstruction of Civil War memory, including an outpouring of exhibitions, publications, films, analyses, and re-analyses at historical societies, public libraries, museums, the academy, and other sites of all kinds across the United States. Many of the “rememberings” I have encountered this year, and expect to encounter over the Sesquicentennial’s duration, offer the audience intimate, personal glimpses into something or someone lost, forgotten, or unacknowledged: the common soldier, beloved family member, and the prisoner as the uncelebrated hero (Living through the Civil War, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA); the experiences of those often ignored (The Forgotten People: Free People of Color of Virginia, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, VA; and the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, Appomattox, VA); and private memories, once buried in layers of cultural sediment, excavated for contemporary relevance (Lisa Blas, Meet Me at the Mason Dixon, Schmucker Art Gallery, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA). Wood joins these efforts to listen to muffled voices as he rescues, quite literally, an “Old Mistress” from the attic, and remedies her neglect in art history. The scholar will respect Wood’s careful looking and intellectual reasoning, the student will appreciate being led step by step through the persistent “treasure hunt” of research, and the casual reader will be swept up by the engaging storyline presented in a graceful read that would take no more than a few short hours to enjoy.