Īn even greater difference from the Rockwell picture is Wyeth’s “background”: arguably the true subject of the painting. The soldier has dropped his bag unlike Rockwell’s weighted figure, releasing his wartime burden at the threshold of the farm so that he can accept with open arms the life he used to know. His dog races to greet him, as in Rockwell’s picture. The lone soldier has come back to the family farm. The scene, like Rockwell’s, is ostensibly happy. Wyeth, in his large drawing entitled Soldier’s Return, also made a picture about death-in-life near war’s end-one that employs the same rhetoric Rockwell used in Homecoming G.I. Alexander Nemerov described this subtlety: The subtle psychological layering of this posture elevates Wyeth’s opus to a level of art beyond illustration. In the final composition, the returning infantryman seems almost to hesitate-happy to be home, certainly, but overwhelmed, perhaps even bearing some of the weight of his time at the front. Īdding to these changes, Wyeth also straightened his subject from the dynamic pose of bent knees and outstretched arms to a stiffer posture of resolve. His bag should be a standard regulation canvas”. and in an absolutely authentic and well-fitting uniform and with a G.I. “The soldier should appear to be younger and slimmer, typically G.I.

The editors of Women’s Day reviewed the drawing and made a few minor suggestions: It has been suggested that none other than Andrew Wyeth posed as the model for this composition, but, with the figure’s back to us, he is idealized and rendered anonymous-any parent’s son returning from war. The process began with an over-scale drawing in charcoal. Wyeth was commissioned by Women’s Day editor Kirk Wilkinson for his own Post-war reunion picture, he adopted a similar concept, but filled the composition with his own stamp of pure Americana.

These share an urban setting and the warm embrace of family and neighborhood characters, and they are certainly among the most memorable images of Americans returning from Europe. He used an even tighter cropping of a similar composition in 1948, the open-ended Homecoming. coming home from the war for the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell produced his own picture of a G.I. Wyeth, along with Norman Rockwell, rose to the occasion. The jubilation at the end of World War II in September of 1945 fueled a hunger for commemorative illustration, and N.

Andrew wyatt artist