Completed in 1865, the year that the Civil War ended, this work was offered for sale at the sixth annual exhibition of the Artist's Fund Society in New York that same year. After this exhibition, where the picture was poorly received, Homer changed various elements and offered it at auction in 1866. The site depicted is a farm in Belmont, Massachusetts, and the anonymous figure has been said to represent the reunion of man and nature after the war. Homer's solitary harvester is identified by the cloverleaf insignia on his canteen as a Northerner who fought with the First Division of the Second Corps of the Sixty-first New York Volunteers. The painting was engraved for Harper's Weekly on July 6, 1872.

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