Its subject matter and small size mark the piece as illustration, while its style points to Homer’s future as a realist painter.

During this period, the focus of the Federal Government shifted from aiding its vulnerable new citizens, to helping rich industrialists fight labor unions.

This optimism, however, was short lived, as continued racism and a harsher form of black codes, the Jim Crow Laws would soon be implemented.

[7] In "The Cotton Pickers", Homer employs a palette of browns and silvery grays on a canvas that measures approximately 24 by 38 inches.

[6] The woman on the right, gunny sack slug across her shoulder, stands erect gazing into the distance, a poignant image of inner life and aspiration.

[5] Far into the distance, Homer places a low blue-green mountain range bordered on the left by a forest and on the right by a single pine rising high above the pale field.

In contrast to the caricatures painted of African Americans during and after the Civil War, Homer's representation of rural workers in heroic terms drew upon a popular European style of the time.

The vast expanse of land portrayed in "The Cotton Pickers" is likely part of a large farm or plantation, indicating that the two figures are common wage laborers.

[10] To emphasize the concept of a never-ending endeavor, Homer places the cotton plants so the viewer cannot see the laborers’ legs, providing an illusion that the pair are unable to move or escape from bondage.

"[7] According to a contemporary art historian, by depicting the women as mulattoes with characteristic Caucasian features such as light skin and fine facial bone structure, Homer indicates they are of mixed race parentage.

Individuals fearful of threats to white racial purity theorized that mulattos were "doomed to biological eradication and could not reproduce beyond a few generations."

Unable to sustain this heritage, "the mulatto would be denied a place in America’s future" and the world of the powerless mixed-race individual would be one in which major change for the black community could never occur.

Because many mulattos were born to wealthy white fathers, they often received special treatment both within the black community and from slave holding relatives.

[10] A fellow scholar and critic concludes that in "The Cotton Pickers", "Homer creates a gap between the specificity of the realistic details and the mysterious evocativeness of the expressions and oblique glances that makes the uneasy relationship of consciousness to ordinary life the subject of the painting."

The result is a conception of the individual as in some sense 'all dressed up with no place to go' with a consciousness that potentially will not be expressed or translated into worldly roles, actions, or identities.