The Cotton Pickers

The Cotton Pickers is a painting by American artist, Winslow Homer. He put this piece together in 1876, and it features two African-American ladies in a cotton field. Whilst being beautifully executed, the artwork also holds an important historical significance within its content.

This carefully crafted piece features two ladies in the foreground, going about their daily tasks. We then find a wide expanse of cotton fields around and behind them, spreading right into the distance. Perhaps this perspective gives the impression of the hard work that lies ahead of them, with so much cotton to collect. Their heads are bowed, shadowing them from the sun but also giving both women a sense of anonymity. A set of trees sits to the left hand side in order to continue the perspective, with the sky given a bright, slightly cloudy appearance. Homer incorporates an impressive level of detail throughout this piece, and it serves as both an aesthetically pleasing artwork, but also a piece with a social conscience. Many historians have examined this piece to look deeper into the meaning of the Cotton Pickers, and there is some debate over how much of a message the artist was intending to deliver, and whether or not he was merely producing a realistic depiction of a scene from his local region.

The artist would feature the Afro-Caribbean community in many artworks, and this was perhaps slightly unusual for the period. Famously, he would do similar within The Gulf Stream, where a sailor would lie back in a desperate situation as his boat struggled in rough conditions at sea. Homer would not always necessarily having something to say in terms of political or social commentary, but just including a wider selection of American society was an important development and this also encoraged others who followed on afterwards to do the same. That said, some have suggested that actually there was some commentary within this piece, as if to say that the women were continuing on with the same occupation that they had before the American Civil War, and that its conclusion had not really changed their lives for the better. Their heads are bowed as they walk through the fields, delivering this atmosphere of disillusionment and dissatisfaction with life.

The painting can be found in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California and is considered particularly topical at the moment. As curators attempt to make their displays and collections a little more diverse and reflective of a changing population, so paintings such as this are important in reminding us abour the journey that the West has gone on over the past few centuries, particularly the US. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art itself has a truly varied collection which is hard to summarise with any great clarity. You will find western modern art here, for example, but also items from the Renaissance and then elements from many other cultures and civilisations, ensuring that pretty much any artistic taste is covered somewhere within this building. The western art featured here covers both European and American art, with some of its best examples including the likes of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's Soap Bubbles, Mary Cassatt's Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child and also Wrestlers by Thomas Eakins.