William Goadby Lawrence’s mid-century painting, Home from the War, unveils an intimate scene between a veteran and his home on the water after returning from service. A veteran himself, Lawrence enlisted in the United States Coast Guard during World War II as a combat artist and chief boatswain’s mate, where he was awarded a Silver Star for heroism in the battle at Salerno, Italy. During his service, Lawrence led a team of cameramen and reporters through the battle of Iwo Jima, Japan, while he worked to make pen-and-ink sketches of the scene before them. In a 1945 interview, Lawrence recounts the naval landing at Iwo Jima as being one of the hardest made during World War II. He describes the bursts of Japanese mortar fire “funneling down upon them” with such force that nothing within range could escape the damage. 

Before the war, Lawrence was an avid angler; so much so, that he and his wife, Margaret, planned to spend their honeymoon saltwater fishing in Florida. His connection to the sport gives Home from the War an essence of self-portraiture, and the angler within the landscape may stand as a representation of Lawrence himself trying to return to normalcy after his harrowing experiences at war. Storm clouds and windblown pines darken Lawrence’s landscape alluding to the weight the veteran carries home from the battlefield. However, from the river, the angler sees the skies give way to sunlight and calm weather on the horizon. The cycle of nature, such as the passing of a storm, is a reassuring reminder that with darkness comes light. 

Lawrence’s painting echoes one titled The Veteran in a New Field by Winslow Homer (below), created shortly after the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In Homer’s painting, a man recently returning from war takes up his scythe and tends the endless rows of hay that lay before him. Expressing a feeling of uncertainty for the veteran’s future, the towering stalks of hay obscure the clear blue sky beyond the horizon, and there is no end in sight for this seemingly impossible task. Regardless, the veteran carries on and steadily works away to clear his place in the landscape before him. Eighty years after Homer’s painting, Lawrence finds himself also looking to traditional connections with nature for guidance during a time of grief and uncertainty. 

William Goadby Lawrence (American, 1913–2002)
Home from the War, ca. 1945
oil on canvas
2019.051.124