WASHINGTON (AP) – Celebrating the Fourth of July, the National Gallery of Art has mounted its first show in a decade on Winslow Homer, who spent years on the Maine coast and is often called the greatest American artist of the 1800s.

Franklin Kelly, senior curator of American art, pointed to Homer’s illustrations of the Civil War, many done for Harper’s magazine.

There’s no general in a cocked hat or serried ranks of soldiers. Instead, there’s an unseen killer – a sharpshooter hidden in a tree – as well as a couple of mounted Union “scouts” in Confederate uniforms and sloppily dressed soldiers on domestic camp duties, listening to a band playing “Home, Sweet Home.”

Though the traditional American teacher was the stern schoolmaster who Kelly notes “taught by discipline, not by nurture,” Homer chose to portray instead a demure, handsome and very young schoolmistress. She is poised in front of a blackboard to give a lesson in mechanical drawing.

A shrewd businessman, Homer found oil painting required a lot of work and didn’t sell easily. Watercolors took less time and could be priced to make them more accessible to modest collectors.

The gallery has such a large collection of Homer’s work – 10 oil paintings, 30 watercolors, 30 drawings and 340 prints – that the selection of 50 pictures in the show gives a broad survey of a career that lasted more than a half-century.

The show opens on Sunday and will be on view through Feb. 20. Admission is free.

Though many of Homer’s figures, especially of young people, reflect what many see as characteristically American optimism, there is melancholy too.

He had a long fascination for the sea, and human struggles with it. In “Dad’s Coming!” an early painting of a fisherman’s wife and son waiting at the seaside of Gloucester, Mass., the boy is eagerly scanning the horizon. His knowing mother, meditative, looks away from the sea.

Homer spent 20 months watching and painting in Cullerecoats, on Britain’s North Sea coast, a fishing village facing rough seas and a rough winter climate. When he returned to America, he soon settled at Prout’s Neck, Maine.

Last fall, the Portland Museum of Art in Maine announced it will buy and preserve his studio, a former carriage house with a balcony looking out over the Atlantic Ocean that provided inspiration for Homer’s seascapes.

Homer interrupted the winters there with stays in the Caribbean, where his bright landscapes and seascapes seemed to come as readily as the violent ones did in the north. He got the effect of brilliant sunlight on white surfaces, not with paint, but by leaving the white paper blank.

Homer had a long interest in fishing, which he much enjoyed, and with hunting, which he viewed more equivocally. His last painting, “Right and Left” of 1909, looks at the shooting of two ducks – from the ducks’ viewpoint. The title refers to the two barrels of a shotgun. The smoke of a gun is seen in the distance, but it is not clear whether the ducks have been hit and are falling, or whether they are just diving toward the sea.