Driving Home the Corn and The Dance After the Husking

Driving Home the Corn and The Dance After the Husking is a significant early work by Winslow Homer (American, 1836-1910), published in 1858 by the influential periodical Harper’s Weekly. This piece, rendered as two separate wood engravings on paper, exemplifies the genre of social illustration that dominated visual culture in the United States prior to mass photography. The complex nature of wood engraving allowed detailed imagery to be rapidly reproduced and disseminated to a wide national audience.

Homer, still early in his career as an illustrator, focused on depicting authentic scenes of American rural life. The composition captures two critical facets of the annual corn harvest: the arduous labor of hauling the crop, represented in the first image, and the communal celebration that follows, traditionally known as a husking bee dance, depicted in the second. Such genre scenes emphasized idealized domesticity and agrarian virtue, providing a reassuring view of American identity in the rapidly changing mid-19th century. This work is a primary example of how visual journalism documented life across the United States.

The popularity of images like Driving Home the Corn and The Dance After the Husking in Harper's Weekly helped establish Homer as a key illustrator of his generation. While the artist is often better known for his later oil paintings and watercolors, these early prints are foundational to understanding his trajectory as an American master. Given its historical status as published illustration, the work is frequently digitized as part of public domain efforts, ensuring broad access to high-quality reproductions of these foundational prints. This example of Homer’s graphic work resides in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.