Prisoners from the Front

A young Union officer stands face to face with three captured Confederates - a defiant young blade, a grizzled old man, a vacant boy - the two sides of a torn nation studying each other across a battlefield. Winslow Homer, who had covered the war as an illustrator, distills its human meaning into this quiet, searching confrontation. Now in the Metropolitan Museum, Prisoners from the Front made his reputation: not a scene of combat but a sober meditation on the types and divisions of America, victor and vanquished measured against one another in silence.