“News of the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861 caught American artists as ill-prepared for a great war as American soldiers were,” wrote Harold Holzer and Martin E. Neely Jr in their classic Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory: The Civil War in Art. Indeed, at the outbreak of hostilities, few if any could conceive of the magnitude of the killing and maiming in a conflict that lasted four years and, according to recent estimates, cost the nation the lives of 750,000 of its own citizens.
In a traumatic, internecine war that changed the face of America, the carnage was accompanied by devastated landscapes, ruined cities, traumatized families and an undermined national optimism. “Soldiers tried to make sense of what they had wrought,” wrote Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. “As they surveyed the scene at battle’s end, they became different men.”
Likewise artists, filled with anxiety and surrounded by the impact of strife, sought to come to grips with the horrendous conflict that photographers made so graphic for so many. American painters of this era worked almost exclusively in landscape, portraiture and genre, with the former the predominant form. History paintings, the traditional European means of glorifying wars and warriors, had never taken hold in youthful America and seemed an unsatisfactory way to record modern warfare. Lacking an illustrious history, American prewar artists, epitomized by the Hudson River School, had celebrated what Europe did not have †sublime wildernesses, breathtakingly beautiful and expansive nature and seemingly limitless land.
As the war progressed, artists evolved approaches to landscapes loaded with symbolism and realist vignettes that captured the uncertainty of everyday life for soldiers (and sailors) and armies (and navies) and for those at home in North and South. The war also coincided with the rise of photography and printing technology that enabled wide dissemination †at least in the North †of battlefield imagery that brought home to the civilian populace the carnage and destruction of war with grim, often ghastly views of body-strewn terrain and devastated areas.
All these issues and more are dealt with in a challenging and revelatory exhibition, “The Civil War in American Art,” organized by senior curator Eleanor Jones Harvey, on view at Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) through April 28. “The role of the Civil War in redefining America is well known,” observes Harvey. “What is less well understood is the profound way in which the conflict changed American art.” Her significant and perceptive exhibition goes a long way toward filling that void.
“The great painters responded to the mood of the nation during this profound internal conflict,” says SAAM director Elizabeth Broun. The exhibition will help people “understand the powerful emotional effect the events of the 1860s had on America.”
Comprising 77 works †59 paintings and 18 vintage photographs †the show features works chosen for their aesthetic quality and ability to convey the intense emotions of the period. The principal focus is on four Northern artists: Stanford Gifford, Eastman Johnson, Frederic Church and Winslow Homer, with considerable attention to Southern artist Conrad Wise Chapman. Harvey stresses that the searing, visceral impact of images by photographers Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan and George Barnard freed paint artists to explore the deeper significance of the war, rather than chronicling individual battles.
Moreover, the expansive nature of the land war, with battle lines surging back and forth and confusion often the order of the day, made it virtually impossible for visual artists to observe and record actual combat.
Most concentrated on the human narrative of the conflict †the often boring, daily experiences of soldiers, slaves and those on the home front. Photographers filled in many of the blanks, particularly with gruesome post-battle images.
Perplexed by the ambiguities and anxieties of the conflict, landscape painters during the war years reflected a sense that the world they knew was being changed forever. Their imagery suggested their misgivings, as well as their hopes for a better future.
The exhibition documents national unease on the eve of the war, heady optimism that it would end soon and a deepening understanding of issues surrounding freeing the slaves and North-South reconciliation. The sense of the American landscape as new Eden gave way to a kind of apocalyptic dread that the country had lost its way.
During the lead up to the Civil War and during its trying years, the imagery of stormy weather, volcanic eruptions and celestial omens was immediately recognizable to most viewers. “Landscapes illuminated the destabilization of the country and became the emotional barometer of the national psyche,” says Harvey.
In 1860, the black, threatening skies of Martin Johnson Heade’s compelling and foreboding “Approaching Thunderstorm” resonated with President Abraham Lincoln’s warnings of a “coming storm” over abolition and preserving the union. Church’s “Meteor of 1860,” prompted by a rare meteor sighting, inspired comparison to arch-abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, which presaged the looming conflict.
Gifford’s somber “Twilight in the Catskills” and “Coming Storm” used melancholy landscapes as haunting metaphors for America on the cusp of disaster. In “Our Banner in the Sky,” the first “war picture,” Church used the tattered American flag that was lowered after Confederates bombarded Fort Sumter to express the nation’s mood. Church’s spectacular “Cotopaxi,” a graphic and colorful rendering of a volcano eruption in Ecuador, suggested the North’s reaction to the outbreak of hostilities.
Meanwhile, Conrad Wise Chapman, an artist’s son serving in the Confederate army, was commissioned to paint scenes of the architecture and daily activity around Charleston Harbor and Fort Sumter after its surrender to the South. His images included the devastated ruin of the fort’s bombed interior, soldiers manning guns and the Confederate flag flying defiantly.
Hudson River School painter Gifford, one of the few professional artists to serve in the Union army, had three stints with New York’s Seventh Regiment, mainly around Washington and Baltimore. He used his landscape painting skills in panoramic glimpses of life in vast encampments before battles, but never depicted actual combat.
Homer, working as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, also focused primarily on life in camp, although when he accompanied the Army of the Peninsula into Virginia at the war’s outset, he recorded a sharpshooter at work, lengthy sieges, some combat vignettes and the aftermaths of battles. They are among the most memorable paintings of the war.
Harvey underscores the manner in which the new medium of photography changed the way Americans viewed the war, visualizing for those at home the violence of combat in clear, sometimes staged views, of dead soldiers. When Brady in 1863 showed in his New York gallery Gardner’s unflinching views of human and horse corpses, capsized artillery, damaged buildings and toppled trees at Antietam, he drew enormous crowds that learned the human cost of war. Remarked one journalist, “If [Brady] has not brought the bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”
Equally searing are Barnard’s photos of the devastation wrought by General William T. Sherman’s “march to the sea” toward the end of the war. Images of Charleston and Columbia, S.C., in ruins documented the effectiveness of Sherman’s scorched-earth policy and previewed the enormous rebuilding task confronting the South after the war.
“The ensuing bitterness that permeated Reconstruction in the South,” notes Harvey, “came from&ealization that the North quickly went back to business as usual, having sustained little damage, while Federal promises to rebuild the South were more often broken than fulfilled.”
“A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War,” on view at the Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Garden in San Marino, Calif., through January 14, explores how photography explained, reflected and shaped the nation’s coming to terms with the war’s unprecedented death toll. The exhibition takes its title from an 1863 comment by Oliver Wendell Holmes responding to the imagery of Antietam that “The field of photography is extending itself to embrace the subjects of strange and sometimes fearful interest.”
Key images include Gardner and O’Sullivan’s grim views of battlefield dead; Andrew J. Russell’s riveting recordings of battlefield devastation and newly established military cemeteries; Barnard’s photos of Sherman’s rampage across the South and Gardner’s photographs depicting the execution of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. “One hundred and fifty years later, these pictures remind us of the great ordeal that shaped America,” observes the Huntington’s curator of photography Jennifer Watts. “And of how photography provided a means of reporting and remembering that ordeal.”
Bitter debates over issues of abolition and emancipation divided the country before, during and after the Civil War. Always sympathetic to the antislavery cause, New Englanders Homer and Johnson reflected in their art their growing awareness of such topics as skin color, literacy, self-emancipation and service in the Union military. Their paintings brought such subjects to national attention.
Homer and Johnson also honed in on subjects vital to conduct of the war and to carrying out Reconstruction. Homer’s “Prisoners from the Front,” showing a Union general confronting three antagonistic Confederate prisoners, and “A Visit from the Old Mistress,” depicting a tense, postwar meeting between a white woman and three formerly enslaved black women, framed issues of sectional hostility and racial inequality that plagued the nation long after the shooting stopped.
Homer’s “Veteran in a New Field,” and “The Cotton Pickers” hinted that each individual would determine what future lay ahead. Johnson’s wind-buffeted “The Girl I Left Behind,” painted during Reconstruction, suggests national ambivalence and uncertainty during those complex years.
With the slaves freed and the Union preserved, Northern landscape painters celebrated victory with brilliant, color-filled pictures that tentatively anticipated a bright future for the country. Church’s “Rainy Season in the Tropics,” with its double rainbow evoking the biblical promise of salvation, and Albert Bierstadt’s “Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California,” glowing with sunlight, suggested the potential of an era of national healing and renewal.
As this exhibition demonstrates, however, American artists approached the future deeply scarred by what the country had just endured and uncertain about what lay ahead. “By the end of the war,” Harvey concludes, “the emphasis within landscape painting had begun to change from a confident association of the nation’s geographic features, destiny, and promise to a psychological reflection of the nation’s conscience.”
The exhibition travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 21⁓eptember 2.
A fully illustrated, scholarly book, written by Harvey and co-published by SAAM and Yale University Press explores America’s artistic coming of age during the Civil War. Provocative and insightful, it sells for $65, hardcover and $45, softcover.
Smithsonian American Art Museum is at Eighth and F Streets, NW. For information, www.Americanart.si.edu or 202-633-7970.
