User:RebusDuplex999/sandbox/CivilWarSandbox

American Art
Sections on Pre-Civil, Civil War, and post Civil War?

Confederate Army and Union Army artists along with those who depicted scenes of the war include: Winslow Homer, Sanford Robinson Gifford (Union artist), Conrad Wise Chapman (Confederate artist)

Landscape Painting
Landscape artists:


 * Frederick Edwin Church
 * Albert Bierstadt

Landscape as metaphor in landscape art: coming storm as metaphor for approaching war eg Martin Johnson Meade Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859. Metropolitan Museum of Art (cite The Civil War and American Art catalog pg 17-71) or meteor as portent to the coming horror of war Frederic Edwin Church Meteor of 1860, 1860 (private collection). The meteor was take by some to be a rocket signaling the beginning of the war. This take on the phenomena was documented and reported in the Chicago Press and Tribune (Chicago Tribune). Images of the meteor along with report on the occurrence appeared in Harper's Weekly. Walt Whitman used the metaphor of the meteor in his poem "Year of Meteors (1859-60)" in referencing the hanging of John Brown was like a meteor as a portent of conflict over slavery.

Another aspect of landscape as a metaphor during this time is the North represented by northern climatic images eg icebergs Frederic Edwin Church The Icebergs, 1861 Dallas Museum of Art, and the South represented by more tropical imagery. As an example, a painting of a volcano erupting by Frederic Edwin Church entitled Cotopoxi, 1862 Detroit Institute of Arts is an example of landscape painting that was pulled into the image of an erupting volcano as the moral volcano of slavery in the United States that has erupted into war. Frederick Douglass used this metaphor in his address from June 1861 entitled "The American Apocalypse."

Genre Painting
Genre art depicts scenes from everyday life. During and after the Civil War, this included paintings like Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South, 1859, The New-York Historical Society, which contains not so subtle social comments by the artist regarding slavery, abolition, and race. Johnson was strongly opposed to slavery and Winslow Homer's A Visit from the Old Mistress, 1876, Smithsonian American Art Museum, which depicts a post-war scene where former slaves are negotiating working for the former mistress as paid help.

Photography
Photography was used for documentation and was viewed as a form of art by the photographers themselves. The Civil War and American Art chp on The Art of Wartime Photography pgs 73-111. Photography was important to changing perspective on war by placing a face on the death of soldiers.

Photographers of the American Civil War:


 * Mathew Brady
 * Alexander Gardner
 * Timothy H. O'Sullivan
 * George N. Barnard