Attention, Company!
Object Description
In Harnett’s picture, a young boy wears an improvised soldier’s costume. Wearing a paper tricorn hat and holding a wooden rod like a rifle, he stares directly at us. The painting does not identify the boy, but he is probably Isaac White, an 8-year-old formerly enslaved child who appeared in a portrait series published by the National Freedman’s Relief Association in 1864. Harnett may have copied Isaac’s likeness from one of these photographs, adding the costumed accessories and the wall marked with graffiti.
Scholars have debated the meaning of this work. Some have speculated that the picture cruelly mocks efforts at the time to venerate Black Civil War veterans. But others have pointed to the ways that Harnett’s rendering breaks from crude stereotypes, particularly the child’s arresting gaze and his carefully individualized features, suggesting that Attention, Company! says something profound about the precarious status of Black Americans during Reconstruction.
—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)
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Teacher Resources
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How has the purpose, media, and style of portraits changed and/or stayed the same throughout time?
How has childhood, and the place of childhood in the national imagination, changed throughout time?
How might the background, clothes, facial expression, and body language depicted in a portrait reveal something about the sitter?
How might the style, subject, and depiction of the sitter reveal something about the artist who created the portrait?
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Grades 4–8
Show students the image Attention, Company! and, as a group, discuss the artwork. Who is the boy in the image? What is he doing? Give students a cinquain poem template and have them write a poem using adjectives that describe this boy and verbs that describe things he might do.
All Levels
Activity 1
Provide students with a small printout of the work of art. Students will glue the image to a larger piece of paper and extend the scene using pencils and colored pencils.Activity 2
Using any media that you may be exploring with your students, have students create a portrait of themselves with a game they enjoy. For older students, have them create a portrait of themselves as younger children with a game from their youth. Example: As a child I often had water-balloon fights with my siblings, so my portrait might be me holding a water balloon in front of our brick house near the water hose.