Snap the Whip

The story of Snap the Whip

A line of barefoot boys holds hands and runs across a meadow, and the two at the end have just been flung loose and are going down in the grass. Behind them is a one-room schoolhouse the color of a barn, and behind that, a green hill under a summer sky. Winslow Homer painted it in 1872, seven years after the Civil War, and it became one of the most loved American pictures almost immediately, partly because it looked like a country that had been at peace forever. This version is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; a slightly larger one with mountains behind hangs in Ohio.

On a wall, Snap the Whip is bright and easy. The dominant colors are meadow green, the warm red of the schoolhouse, white shirts, and a blue sky, so it lifts a room without shouting. It suits a kids' room, a family room, a kitchen, a cabin, or a hallway, and it fits farmhouse, Americana, cottage, and traditional interiors, especially with painted wood and gingham. It is a wide image, and we offer it in the Mini at 13.4 × 8 in and the Petite at 18.4 × 11 in. The Petite is the size for a wall of its own above a bench or a dresser; the Mini belongs in a grouping.

Homer's Breezing Up is the same boyhood on a sailboat, and The Gulf Stream is what he painted when the boys grew up. Constable's The Hay Wain is the English version of this kind of settled countryside. More from Winslow Homer.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Met's canvas, with the summer greens held to the original.