Virginia Historical Society Podcast

On April 18, 2013, Elizabeth O'Leary delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "Winslow Homer's Virginia." When his paintings were exhibited in 1866, artist Winslow Homer gained critical acclaim for picturing "what he has seen and known." Afterward, this reputation for objectivity helped bolster the celebrated artist's long and prosperous career. Focusing on Homer's representations of Virginia during the Civil War and post-Reconstruction era, Elizabeth O'Leary examines the more subjective aspects - political, cultural, and personal - that informed his creation of some of the most enduring images of nineteenth-century America. An art historian who resides in Richmond, O'Leary is the former associate curator of American art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. (Introduction by Paul Levengood)