The Brierwood Pipe (1864): Art, History and Details

The Brierwood Pipe (1864) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Created during the United States Civil War, Winslow Homer’s painting depicts two volunteers for the Union Army who sport their regiment’s highly colorful uniforms, a design discovered to be impractical due to its ability to be spotted by sharpshooters. Passing idle time in their encampment, one soldier holds a lit pipe and watches his companion whittle a block of wood. The painting shares its title with a contemporary poem, in which a soldier smokes a brierwood pipe and daydreams of the time when the conflict will end so he can return home. The museum acquired this painting during World War II, and it seems likely that the painting’s subject was viewed as especially significant for its wartime audience.

Object facts

• Title: The Brierwood Pipe
• Date: 1864
• Creator attribution: Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 68.9 x 64.1 x 9.2 cm (27 1/8 x 25 1/4 x 3 5/8 in.); Unframed: 42.8 x 37.5 cm (16 7/8 x 14 3/4 in.); Former: 69 x 64 x 8 cm (27 3/16 x 25 3/16 x 3 1/8 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1944.524

A detail from the museum

During the Civil War, Homer worked as an artist-reporter for the New York newspaper Harper's Weekly.

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Marr, Timothy. "The American Zouave." Military Images 34, no. 4. 22-29
• Goodrich, Lloyd, and Abigail Booth Gerdts. Record of Works by Winslow Homer. 2005.
• Holzer, Harold and Mark E. Neely, Jr., eds. Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory: The Civil War in Art. (New York: Orion, 1993).

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.