Homecoming, 1945

A troopship comes up New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty at sunrise, every deck, rail and mast crowded with soldiers coming home. Tugs and harbor craft swarm alongside. Through the summer and autumn of 1945 this scene repeated itself almost daily.

The New York Port of Embarkation had sent more than three million men overseas during the war. Now the same piers were taking them back. The great liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, painted gray, carried up to 15,000 troops on each crossing, sleeping in shifts in stacked bunks. Smaller transports, Liberty and Victory ships, brought the rest.

For most of the men aboard, the statue had been the last thing they saw of the country going out. It was the first thing they saw coming back.

The ship's bow cuts in from the left, so close the rivets show, and above it the decks are a solid mass of khaki — thousands of tiny raised arms and caps, men climbing the rigging to see. The flag at the jackstaff is the only saturated color in a painting otherwise soaked in gold morning haze. Across the water the statue stands half-dissolved in that light, with the sun behind her shoulder. Tug smoke drifts through the middle distance. The mood is noise, but the paint is quiet.