  About the Artwork
  
  
  Seeking respite from the heat, a young girl in a pristine white dress sits in a shady spot near the wall of a house. She holds a four-leaf clover in her right hand — a difficult detail to distinguish among the lush summer growth. Vines climb up the house. Flowers bloom from an old wooden barrel propped up on bricks and a makeshift window box. In Winslow Homer’s time, and still today, children hunted for the rare four-leaf clover to bring good luck.

Homer made his name as an illustrator for national magazines, traveling to the front line during the American Civil War (1861 – 65) to depict the violence of battle. After the war, he shifted his focus to idealized views of leisure and rural life. Homer probably based this scene of bucolic childhood on sketches he made in 1873 during summer visits to Walden, New York, near the Catskill Mountains, or coastal Gloucester, Massachusetts.
  
  
  Title
  The Four-Leaf Clover
  
  
  Artwork Date
  1873
  
  Artist
  Winslow Homer
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1836-1910
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  American
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  Unframed: 14 1/4 × 20 3/8 inches (36.2 × 51.8 cm)
  Framed: 25 × 30 15/16 × 4 5/8 inches (63.5 × 78.6 × 11.7 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  American Art before 1950
  
  
  Credit
  Bequest of Robert H. Tannahill
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  70.150
  
  
  Copyright
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