The Veteran in a New Field

A man harvests wheat with a scythe in a sunlit field, his Union army jacket and canteen cast aside in the foreground - a returning Civil War soldier who has traded his weapon for a farmer's tool. Winslow Homer charges the quiet scene with meaning: the single old-fashioned scythe evokes both the biblical turning of swords into plowshares and the grim reaper who has just harvested so many lives. Now in the Metropolitan Museum, the Veteran in a New Field is a spare, profound emblem of a nation laying down its arms after the war.