During the American Civil War, Winslow Homer visited many Union soldiers' camps and a few battlefields on assignment as artist-correspondent for Harper's Weekly. In addition to his sketches for the magazine, Homer painted several humorous depictions of the soldiers' camp life. In "Playing Old Soldier," he shows a young volunteer being examined by a doctor on the left while an orderly on the right records the encounter. "Old soldier," as the phrase was sometimes used during the Civil War, referred to a soldier who malingered in order to avoid work or combat. Much like a young child pretending to be sick in order to stay home from school, this young soldier is feigning illness so as to evade some unpleasant or dangerous duty. There were thousands of soldiers under the age of sixteen fighting in the Civil War, and boys as young as eleven served as drummers and fifers.
Although many of Homer's Civil War paintings were humorous, others were serious and captured the violence of modern warfare as well as the poignancy of the soldiers' lives. Homer's skill and sensitivity in depicting these subjects stood out, especially when compared to other artists' renderings of the Civil War. His grasp of the simple, telling gesture and his accomplished draftsmanship led to early success and election to the National Academy of Design, America's most prestigious art organization, by the age of twenty-nine.

This text was adapted from Carol Troyen and Janet Comey," Children in American Art" (Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2007, in Japanese).

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