Boys in a Pasture

Two boys sit in the grass of a summer pasture, with a sweep of flat fields running back to a line of trees, and nothing else happens. In the lower right Homer signed the canvas with his name, the year 1874 and the letters N.A., for National Academician. The National Academy of Design in New York had made him a full member in 1865, the year the Civil War ended, when he was 29. Through the early 1870s small paintings of country children, at play or simply idle, found him a steady market. Local historians in Hurley, a farming village in the Hudson Valley in New York where Homer painted in those years, see the flats along their creek in the fields behind these two boys. In 2010 the United States Postal Service put the picture on a 44-cent stamp. It was the third Homer painting to appear on one, after Breezing Up and The Fog Warning, which hangs in the same museum.