Snap the Whip is an 1872 painting by American Realist artist Winslow Homer. It is located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, United States.
Analysis of Homer’s Snap the Whip
Painted six years after the American Civil War during which American painter Winslow Homer depicted the lives of the soldiers, Snap the Whip (1872) shows a group of boys outside a red schoolhouse in a vast landscape performing a game.
The game, a model of cooperation, became in this picture a nod to communal healing and collaboration in the rebuilding of American society after the war. Evidence of the need for mutual feeling is in the glance of the two boys at the fallen boy on the left.