The Red School House

Winslow Homer

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the knees up, a pale-skinned woman stands close to us with a red schoolhouse in the distance under a sunset sky in this vertical painting. The woman’s body faces us, but she turns her head to look off to the left with light brown eyes. She has a short, straight nose, full pink lips, and a round face. Her blond hair is pulled up under a round white hat layered with ruffles, which lies like a pancake over the top of her head. Her white dress is vertically striped with thin rust-red lines and has a long-sleeved, tight-fitting bodice and a long skirt. A dark gray belt is cinched around her narrow waist, and she wears a black, lacy ruffle around her neck. The woman’s arms hang by her sides, and she holds two paperback-sized books in her left hand, to our right. An earth-brown lawn stretches back to the schoolhouse, which has crimson-red walls, a chimney, and a dark gray roof. Three forms painted with a few streaks of dark or light gray or topaz blue suggest people standing near the door of the schoolhouse. Trees and a grassy lawn beyond the building are loosely painted with blended strokes. The sky is shaded pale lemon yellow and light peach with touches of rose pink. The artist signed and dated the lower right corner, “HOMER 1873.”