“September Sun” is a ballad-like number, which is rare but not completely surprising, and it has some of the most emotionally gripping hooks ever written by the group. Not to worry, however, because there is still plenty of doom n’ gloom to go around in the form of two of my favorite numbers from the album – “The Profits of Doom” and “These Three Things”. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Ī soldier in blue sits high on the branch of a pine tree. The barrel of his rifle, jutting hard across the canopy of green, is mounted with a lens that he holds close to his eye as he takes aim. Neither can the man he is about to kill, down below, hundreds of yards away, whether in the midst of battle or furtively leaving camp to fill canteens-many soldiers got shot this way-or simply lifting his head above fortifications to take a breath. The telescopic rifle, widely introduced in this country during the Civil War, allowed for attack with unprecedented stealth, a technological leap akin in our time to the military drone. In the spring of 1862, Winslow Homer observed the sharpshooting soldiers trained to use these weapons while encamped with the Union Army at the Virginia front. Homer, at twenty-six, was a professional artist-reporter, his drawings often reproduced in the illustrated press. #Victorian era grim reaper scythe drawing professional# “Sharpshooter,” by reliable account his first oil painting, completed in 1863, was preceded in the public eye by his engraving of the same hawkeyed soldier in Harper’s Weekly, part of the excitement over the élite new unit’s efficacy and skill. It would be easy to assume that he shared the excitement-his soldier has a mesmerizing energy and focus-were it not for a randomly surviving letter he wrote decades later, recalling that the use of these rifles had struck him “as being as near murder as anything I ever could think of in connection with the army.” He added a quick drawing of an unsuspecting victim framed in a rifle’s crosshairs. “Sharpshooter” was painted back in the safety of Homer’s studio, in New York City. He’d moved from his native Boston in 1859, using the job at Harper’s as security while enrolling in life-drawing classes (one didn’t draw naked bodies in art class in Boston) and taking a few lessons in painting technique from a transplanted Frenchman.
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