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Homer painted a modern cradle scythe first, then covered it and put this single archaic blade in its place. X-rays found the earlier tool underneath.

Winslow Homer had spent the war as an artist-correspondent for Harper's Weekly, embedded with the Army of the Potomac, drawing sharpshooters and picket lines and men waiting. In the autumn of 1865, months after Appomattox and Lincoln's funeral train, he painted a single figure with his back turned in a field of ripe wheat. The country had just finished counting: something near three quarters of a million dead, out of a population of 31 million. The harvest of 1865 was enormous, and the men who came home to cut it had spent four years at other work. Homer left the evidence in the lower right corner, where most viewers never look: a dark heap that is the man's army jacket and canteen, dropped in the stubble. That is the whole plot. The uniform is on the ground and the shirt is white and the work is agricultural again, which is what the title means by a new field. The Northern press was full of that argument in 1865, the citizen soldier laying down the rifle and picking up the tool, and Homer painted the argument without a word of encouragement in it. Then there is the scythe, and the scythe is why the painting is disturbing rather than pastoral. X-rays taken at the Metropolitan Museum show that Homer first painted the tool an American farmer would actually have used in 1865, a cradle scythe with a wooden rack to catch the grain, and then deliberately painted it out and replaced it with a plain long single blade, the archaic kind, the kind Death carries in every woodcut in Europe. He made the picture less accurate on purpose. A lone figure swinging that blade through standing ranks of wheat had one meaning for anyone who had read four years of casualty lists, and the wheat in the painting is cut down in exactly the swath a man makes walking forward. Homer was 29 and had barely begun; he went on to the sea pictures that made him America's great painter of weather and solitude. This one hangs in New York with the jacket still in the corner. The man's face is never shown.