Driving Home the Corn and The Dance After the Husking

The page shown here displays two of three engravings produced for the article “Corn-Husking in New England.” Drawn little more than a year after Homer started working for Harper’s Weekly, the works reveal that he had not yet come into his own stylistically. The images rely on standard depictions of the subject often found in the art of genre painters of the 1840s and 1850s, and indeed, they echo Homer’s own earlier version of the theme. They are not without charm, however, for they present the stereotyped idyllic vision of hard work and its rewards in rural America.