1874 Winslow Homer · Thomas Nast · Decoration Day Lincoln — Harper's June 13

🗞️ HARPER'S WEEKLY · June 13, 1874
Complete Issue + Supplement Pages · New York

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A Winslow Homer print. Two Thomas Nast cartoons. A Decoration Day ceremony at the Lincoln Monument in Union Square. Fires on Long Island. A flower mission. Boys raiding a cliff swallow colony on a summer bank. This is one of the most visually rich issues in this run of Harper's Weekly — and the Homer alone makes it exceptional.

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🖼️ THE MAIN ISSUE
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🎨 WINSLOW HOMER — "RAID ON A SAND SWALLOW COLONY"
Full page. This is the print that makes the issue. Winslow Homer — one of the greatest American artists who ever lived, whose paintings now hang in the Met, the National Gallery, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston — contributed illustrations to Harper's Weekly throughout his career, and those pages are actively collected as fine art in their own right. "Raid on a Sand Swallow Colony" shows boys scrambling up a sandy bank to raid cliff swallow nests in summer — all the physical joy and mischief of American boyhood, rendered in Homer's unmistakable hand. It is among the most sought-after prints in this entire era of Harper's. For Homer collectors, American art collectors, and anyone who loves the feeling of a summer afternoon in 1874 New England — this is the page.

🖼️ FRONT PAGE — THOMAS NAST: "JEWELS AMONG SWINE"
Full front page political cartoon — Nast at his sharpest in the overheated politics of Grant's second term. A Nast front page in original form is a collector's piece on its own terms.

🖼️ THOMAS NAST: "A DEAD FAILURE"
A second full-page Nast inside — political, pointed, and beautifully drawn. Two Nast pages in a single issue remains exceptional.

🏛️ "DECORATION DAY — SERVICES AROUND THE LINCOLN MONUMENT, UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK"
Full page. Decoration Day — now Memorial Day — was still new in 1874, just six years after its first official proclamation in 1868. This illustration captures the ceremony at the Lincoln Monument in Union Square: crowds gathered, wreaths laid, the nation still raw from the Civil War pausing to remember its dead. For Lincoln collectors, Civil War memorial history collectors, and New York City history enthusiasts, this page carries real weight.

🌸 "THE FLOWER MISSION"
Full page. The Flower Mission was a Gilded Age charitable movement that brought fresh flowers from gardens and florists to hospital patients, tenement children, and the poor — a gentle, optimistic piece of 1870s urban reform rendered in Harper's finest engraving.

🔥 "FIRES IN THE LONG ISLAND WOODS"
Full page. A dramatic landscape illustration of the Long Island brush fires of 1874 — smoke, flame, and the particular flatness of Long Island's pine barrens rendered from life.

⚔️ "WHO STRUCK DE FUSTEST"
Full page. A Civil War narrative illustration — the question of who struck first, whose charge broke the line, the contested memory of battle that consumed veterans' reunions and regimental histories for decades after Appomattox.

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📄 THE SUPPLEMENT PAGES
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🤝 DOUBLE-PAGE CENTERFOLD — "RETURNING THE SALUTE"
The supplement's showpiece — a large-format double-page scene of military or civic ceremony, the full breadth of the supplement page deployed for maximum visual impact.

🏘️ "WELL AT HASTINGS, ENGLAND"
Two-thirds page. A beautifully engraved English village well scene — Hastings, with its medieval associations and seaside character, rendered in the Victorian travel illustration tradition.

🎭 "CAUGHT IN THE ACT"
Half-page genre scene — a moment of discovery, mischief, or confrontation captured in Harper's characteristic narrative illustration style.

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📋 CONDITION
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Intake photographs of every page — including all supplement pages — are included in this listing. Please review all images carefully. Questions are very welcome, and I'm happy to photograph any specific page or detail on request.

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📌 DETAILS
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Publication ········ Harper's Weekly
Date ··············· June 13, 1874
City ··············· New York
Pages ·············· Complete · 16 pages + Supplement
Format ············· Illustrated folio newspaper

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🔍 SEO TAGS
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