History and Theory, Theme Issue 41 (December 2002), 17-42
© Wesleyan University 2002 ISSN: 0018-2656
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING, OR
WHY ARE THESE PICTURES SO TERRIBLE?1
STEVEN CONN
Historic painting . . . occupies the most exalted rank in the various departments of art.
—E. Anna Lewis, 1854
ABSTRACT
The Civil War generated hundreds of history paintings. Yet, as this essay argues, painters
failed to create any iconic, lasting images of the Civil War using the conventions of grand
manner history painting, despite the expectations of many that they would and should.
This essay first examines the terms by which I am evaluating this failure, then moves on
to a consideration of the American history painting tradition. I next examine several history paintings of Civil War scenes in light of this tradition and argue that their “failure” to
capture the meaning and essence of the war resulted from a breakdown of the narrative
conventions of history painting. Finally, I glance briefly at Winslow Homer’s Civil War
scenes, arguably the only ones which have become canonical, and suggest that the success
of these images comes from their abandonment of old conventions and the invention of
new ones.
I. INTRODUCTION
In 1882, when aging poet Walt Whitman published Specimen Days—autobiographical analects of his travel journals, recollections of his youth, notes on
nature—he penned what has proved to be perhaps the single most enduring line
about the American Civil War: “The real war,” Whitman concluded, “will never
get in the books.”2 That assessment may strike us now as an unintended ironic
taunt. Whitman’s remark, written twenty years after his participation in the war
as a hospital volunteer, has certainly not deterred writers of both fiction and nonfiction from trying to get the “real” war into countless numbers of books.
By writing that line, Whitman was admitting, and perhaps excusing, his own
failure to complete a prose project about the war. By the time he wrote Specimen
Days, Whitman had decided that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all that
the war could not be given literary form: “Future years will never know the
seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and
1. The author needs to thank Peter Conn, Barbara Groseclose, Lisa Florman, Pamela Fletcher,
Sylvia Yount, Claudio Fogu, David Hoffmann, Drew Faust, and Beth Johns for their readings of this
essay, and the students of Hist. 792 for their good ideas. This essay began its life as a wonderful collaboration with Andy Walker, first as a talk at the Art Institute of Chicago and then as “The History
in the Art: Painting the Civil War,” Museum Studies 27 (2001). Again, and always, thanks to Angela.
2. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (Boston: David R. Godine, 1971), 60.
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STEVEN CONN
interiors (not the official surface courteousness of the generals, not the few great
battles) of the Secession War; and it is best they should not.” The experience of
the war, all its complexity and horror, “will never be written—perhaps must not
and should not be.”3
Whitman had a certain right to make this claim. As Alfred Kazin pointed out
some years ago, Whitman was virtually the only major American writer to turn
his personal participation in the war—albeit not as a soldier—into literary fodder.4 Whitman, almost alone, took on the challenge of turning the immediacy of
war into literature, and it defeated him.
But he was not the first or only man of letters to lament what writers had or
had not done with the Civil War. William Dean Howells, two years after
Appomattox, complained that “our war has not only left us a burden of a tremendous national debt, but has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has
hitherto staggered very lamely.”5 For John W. DeForest, in fact, the great war
novel to be written in the latter half of the nineteenth century was not American
but Russian. Writing wistfully to Howells about his literary encounter with
Tolstoy, he said, “Let me tell you that nobody but he has written the whole truth
about war and battle. I tried . . . .”6
The task of writing the war was thus largely taken up by the documentarians,
and one suspects that their endless compilations of facts, while filling pages literally too numerous to count, still would not satisfy the poet’s desire to capture
the “real” war. Indeed, the perpetual motion machine of Civil War publishing
seemed to gall John Macy, who carped in 1911, “If no book had been written the
failure of that conflict to get itself embodied in some masterpieces would be less
disconcerting. Yet thousands of books were written by people who knew the war
at first hand and who had literary ambition and some skills, and from all these
books, none rises to distinction.”7 There was to be no American War and Peace.
Writers, however, were not the only ones who failed to capture the “reality” of
the Civil War. Whitman’s comment about books might well be applied, whether
he had any opinions on the subject, to history painting. The war’s motivating
morality and its transcendent meanings did not appear on American canvases,
just as they did not appear in print. Though plenty of commentators at the time
felt sure that the war was just the sort of epic historical event that would inspire
3. Ibid.
4. See Alfred Kazin’s “Introduction,” to ibid., xx-xxi.
5. Which is not to say that the war did not affect American writers and their work. On the contrary,
a generation ago Daniel Aaron and Edmund Wilson both demonstrated the huge impact the war had
on American writing. Both admitted, however, that whatever had come out of the Civil War, a truly
great novel or poem was not among those things. As Aaron put it, almost defensively, “the paucity of
‘epics’ and ‘masterpieces’ is no index of the impact of the War on American writers.” Howells quoted in Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973), xv; see also xix, xviii.
6. See Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 684. Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage would not appear
until 1895. His represents a new generation of American writing. As Wilson points out, Crane wrote
the Red Badge of Courage only after reading Tolstoy.
7. Quoted in Aaron, The Unwritten War, xvii.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
19
American history painters, these painters did not, ultimately, rise to the occasion.
As a reviewer complained, describing the National Academy’s 1865 exhibition,
the work “seems to us not very good . . . we should gladly have seen more works
inspired by the war.”8
It is that failure that I propose to explore in this essay. More specifically, I want
to use the disappointing production of Civil War history painting in the so-called
“grand manner” as a lens through which to examine the impact of the Civil War
on the nation’s intellectual history. The failure of history painting to represent the
“real” war reminds us that Henry James was surely right when he remarked:
“The Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind.” Tracing the
attempts at putting the war on canvas in the grand manner may well elucidate the
meaning of James’s eminently quotable if inscrutable observation.
Let me explain quickly what I mean. The Civil War did in fact become the subject of many paintings.9 And yet, as with writing, this volume of production
seemed only to underscore a sense of dissatisfaction with it all. As one contemporary writer put it, somewhat baffled, “It is indeed impossible to account for the
small demand which the war created for scenes and episodes from the great
struggle which for years was foremost in the minds of the people.”10
This writer, however, may have been making quantitative what was really a
qualitative problem. Just as thousands of pages had been devoted to the subject,
so too acres of canvas had been covered with Civil War scenes, but, as this
author’s complaints suggest, none of the results was deemed to be in any way a
“masterpiece,” which captured the public imagination and stimulated demand for
reproductions. And as I had the chance to discover recently when I taught a graduate seminar on war and memory in the American nineteenth century, almost
without exception those works that followed the conventions of so-called grand
manner history painting are—how to put this—dreadful. At the very least these
paintings do not succeed in formal terms: badly executed, poorly organized,
derivative, and hackneyed.
As the cliché goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I share the reluctance of those who are suspicious of using the categories of analysis defined by
the criteria of aesthetic values. As Drew Faust has noted, historians of America’s
intellectual history have generally shied away from using “iconographical” evidence, in part, I suspect, because we are reluctant to make value judgments—
good vs. bad, beautiful vs. ugly, successful vs. failing—that such evidence may
force us to make.11 And yet, suspicious as I am, I find myself wondering whether
we haven’t lost something by avoiding altogether issues of aesthetic value judgment. Perhaps we might find great cultural meaning by drawing these kinds of
8. n.a., “The Exhibition at the National Academy,” Harper’s Weekly 9 (May 13, 1865), 291.
9. In fact, a quick check of the Smithsonian Institution’s Art Inventory file yields an even five hundred paintings with the Civil War as their subject—though most of them are portraits, battlefield landscapes, and camp scenes.
10. n.a., “The Progress of Painting in America,” North American Review 124 (1877), 458.
11. Drew Gilpin Faust, “Race, Gender, and Confederate Nationalism: William D. Washington’s
Burial of Latane,” Southern Review 25 (1989), 297.
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STEVEN CONN
distinctions. In the case of the Civil War history paintings I encountered in my
seminar, I began wondering if those works’ dreadfulness itself might not be
worth exploring—if bad paintings might reveal something of the significance of
the war as it was experienced imaginatively.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is surely right to say that aesthetic values are contingent and shifting, but, as she goes on, this is not to say that they are hopelessly subjective. In her view, to make value judgments about works of art, as I do in
this essay, is in part to estimate how well those works achieved certain implied
goals or fulfilled certain functions. When I label these paintings “dreadful” I am
indeed making an evaluation, presentist to be sure, based on my personal taste—
most of these paintings do make me cringe to look at them—but I am also arguing that they failed to serve their defined functions, and that these functional failures are bound up in aesthetic failures as well.12
So let me try to couch my own evaluations of these paintings in a larger nineteenth-century cultural context. There are several ways to measure how the paintings I will discuss largely fell as flat with viewers in the nineteenth century as
they do with me today. None of the painters examined here, those who did
attempt history painting in the grand manner, found their way into the collections
of biographical sketches that defined the art-historical enterprise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—not in G. W. Sheldon’s 1881 American
Painters, not in Charles Caffin’s 1906 volume, not in J. Walker McSpadden’s
1923 book either.13 And with the exception of George Caleb Bingham, none of
their reputations has been resuscitated more recently. I would wager that no history painting of the Civil War done in the grand manner, nor most of their
painters, make it into any survey course in American art history today.
More than that, none of these books includes the Civil War even as a subject—
the painters of the late nineteenth century featured in these volumes, and the ones
we remember today, gained their reputations painting things other than history,
most notably landscapes and genre scenes.14 In fact, almost none of the five hundred Civil War paintings indexed by the Smithsonian Art Inventory file now
resides in what we would identify as major art museums. James Hope’s Army of
the Potomac is owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, but the vast majority of these works hang in places like the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News,
Virginia, and the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Hall in Madison,
Wisconsin.
12. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical
Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), esp. 11-16.
13. G. W. Sheldon, American Painters [1881] (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972); Charles Caffin,
American Masters of Painting (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906); J. Walker
McSpadden, Famous Painters of America (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1923). Though it
concentrates mostly on the post-WWII era, the most useful discussion of the development of an
American art history is Wanda Corn’s “Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art,” Art
Bulletin 70 (1988), 188-207.
14. Sheldon’s book, which contains sketches of sixty-eight artists and over one hundred engraved
illustrations, includes one Civil War subject, a portrait of Union General Meade painted by Thomas
Hicks.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
21
The problem, then, was not that painters did not try to capture the Civil War in
paint, but that they were unable, apparently, to use history painting to convey the
large meanings and ultimate truths of the conflict, whatever those might have
been. It is surely the case that a consensus developed about these paintings
almost immediately, and it has proved remarkably enduring. None of these paintings, I think it is fair to say, has become iconic in any meaningful way.
Whitman, and the others who expected great art from the Civil War, may have
set their expectations unreasonably high. While American critics and others at
the outbreak of the war still revered history painting, and while the nation’s own
Revolution had been wonderfully productive of iconic historical scenes, in fact
the entire genre was already on the wane. Grand manner history painting in
Europe fell victim to changing tastes, vanishing patrons, and moribund academies. And as we look back on it now, warfare from the mid-nineteenth century
on has proved a lousy muse for painters. The Franco-Prussian War, the SpanishAmerican War, the First World War may have generated many public monuments, but remarkably few enduring works of art or literature.
In addition, the Civil War occurred at a revolutionary moment in American
visual culture. Photography and mass-produced graphic illustrations in newspapers and magazines created thousands of images of the war. The speed with
which these images could be created, and the possibility of their reproduction ad
infinitum, proved tough competition for artists who still worked with paint on
canvas.
The absence of significant Civil War history painting can be attributed, then,
to a set of perfectly straightforward art-historical reasons, and in this decline,
Americans absolutely kept up with the Europeans. On top of that, as the conventional wisdom has gone, the problem of history painting in America was compounded because we had so little “history” to begin with. After John Trumbull
exhausted the Revolution as a subject, there wasn’t much left to paint.15 To have
demanded great history painting from the Civil War, then, may simply have been
asking too much.
And yet, painters did try to respond to the war, many of them and in many
paintings, but in so doing they had to rely on the only genre most had available—
grand manner history painting. While history painting itself was a dying genre
for all of the sensible explanations given above, those explanations remain frustratingly internal to the dynamics of art. In examining why it was that the Civil
War neither produced great history painting, nor served to reinvigorate a dying
genre, I will suggest here that the personal failure of painters, the lack of adequate patronage, or even new technologies cannot fully explain why painters
could not make sense of the war. Rather, in their attempts to reckon with the Civil
War in the grand manner, history painters found themselves confronted with two,
inter-related representational crises.
15. Lloyd Goodrich articulated this view some while ago, and it has endured. See Lloyd Goodrich,
“The Painting of American History: 1775–1900,” American Quarterly 3 (1951), 283-294.
22
STEVEN CONN
First, the narrative conventions of history painting within which painters
worked proved inadequate to the task of describing or explaining the mass,
destructive phenomenon that was the Civil War. Second, the narrative conventions of grand manner history painting functioned to express a certain kind of historical consciousness that by the mid-nineteenth century had largely evaporated.
The Civil War can be seen as both having caused a crisis of how to represent, and
as punctuating the period when history painting, governed by a set of old rules,
could give meaning to the way historical events were understood. Here, then,
was the unsolvable dilemma for painters who wanted to capture the war on canvas: the Civil War underscored the inability of history painting to make sense of
the world the way it once had, yet how else but through grand manner history
painting could one even try? Poignant and agonized as many of these paintings
are, any attempt to use grand manner conventions to give meaning to the Civil
War was probably doomed to fail.
Grand manner history painting is a form of narrative—simply put, it tells a
story. To borrow from Hayden White, history painting is a visual solution to the
problem of translating “knowing into telling.” Like the telling of history itself,
history painting followed certain conventions, rules which governed both how
painters should paint and how viewers should view.16 War as well is a “narrative
invention,” as Drew Faust has put it: “for only a story of purpose and legitimation can transform random violence into what human convention has designated
as war.”17 Dominick LaCapra, writing about the problems of “representing” the
holocaust, has examined the ways in which historical “trauma” led to crises of
traditional representational strategies, the familiar ways of creating order and
coherence out of experience.
Without drawing the comparison too closely, I want to suggest that for nineteenth-century Americans the Civil War was just this kind of traumatic event.18
Indeed, such was the trauma of the war that American history painters, both during and after, found themselves unable to give purpose and legitimation to it in
the ways they had relied on for roughly one hundred years. In the end, the magnitude of the Civil War simply shattered the narrative frameworks within which
painters and writers had given meaning to events, the way they created, in
White’s terms, the “true” from the “real.” Most obviously, the scale of death and
destruction was so extensive that it defied easy, formulaic comprehension.
Just as unsettling, however, were questions about the war’s larger purpose.
What was this war about? Abstract notions like “union,” or “states’ rights”? The
16. According to White, out of those conventions came meaning. As White puts it, representing
real events through narrative “arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that can only be imaginary.” In the end, the conflation of
what is “true” with what is “real” can only come through narrative, and it is at this level that we should
understand Whitman’s lament that the “real” war would never make it into the books. Hayden White,
The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1, 6, 24.
17. Faust, “Race, Gender, and Confederate Nationalism,” 301.
18. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994).
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
23
humanitarian goal of emancipation and the abolition of slavery? Expansionist
debates over how the western territories would be settled? Economic principles
like “free labor”? As David Blight has recently reminded us, what the war was
finally about, and who got to decide, “has been the most contested question in
American historical memory since 1863 . . . ”19 It should come as no surprise that
painters had no better luck formulating some easy consensus on what it all
meant.
At the same time, the conventions of grand manner history painting, as they
emerged in the eighteenth century, gave expression to a historical consciousness
in which past and present were seen to be connected by a cyclical dynamic. By
the time Fort Sumter was fired upon, however, the way Americans understood
history itself had changed. Historical cycles were replaced with linear, evolutionary progress as the way history was understood. History’s purpose, then, by
the 1860s, was to chart the distance between present and past. As a result history painting, its rules, and traditions had become fundamentally anachronistic.
Of all the ruptures attendant on the Civil War then—political, social, economic, military—the collapse of older narrative conventions, the inability of those
conventions to give meaning to events, and the challenge the war posed to historical understanding itself, stand as perhaps the most significant for the nation’s
intellectual life. By tracking the trajectory of history painting we can take some
measure of the magnitude of these ruptures.
II. HISTORY PAINTING, AMERICAN STYLE
In his 1811 primer on manners and morals for American youth, Charles Peirce
asked this question: “What are the most esteemed paintings?” and gave this
answer, “Those representing historical events.”20 This simple children’s quiz
summarized as aptly and succinctly as possible a critical consensus in both the
United States and in England. By the turn of the nineteenth century, history painting stood at the apex of painterly achievement.
History painting, as it developed in the eighteenth century, was not merely the
practice of transcribing historical events in paint. It was a genre that followed its
own set of rules, codified most importantly in the Anglo-American world by
British painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. Grand manner history painting in the eighteenth century attempted to weave together the heroism of individuals with universal moral messages embodied by those individuals at particular moments—
specific scenes illustrating eternal truths. Compositionally, many painters underscored those messages by making reference to earlier works from the Christian
and classical traditions—lamentation scenes, crucifixions, pietas, for example.
19. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2001), 1.
20. Charles Peirce, The Arts and Sciences Abridged . . . (Portsmouth, N. H., 1811), 48.
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STEVEN CONN
Done in the grand manner, painting rendered the past with didactic intent and
moral truth.21
Most painters felt that the best way to achieve the goals of grand style history
painting was through the use of a classical visual vocabulary—Jacques Louis
David’s The Death of Socrates (1787) famously a case in point. At one level, the
use of classical scenes underscored the timeless and the ideal that was supposed
to be expressed by history painting. More importantly, however, the use of a classical vocabulary in history painting, the allusions both to composition and subject, reinforced a conception of history as essentially cyclical. By the second half
of the eighteenth century the notion that societies and nations rose and fell in
endless sequence according to fixed moral laws had a tremendous currency both
in England and in the colonies. Indeed, by the time of the Revolution, according
to Stow Persons, a cyclical conception of history prevailed among “the dominant
social group in America.”22
The narrative conventions of grand style history painting gave visual form to
this cyclical theory of history. In so doing, these paintings reinforced an essential
connection between the present and the past by linking the truths of classical history with those of the contemporary world. Reynolds understood this when he
described for the audience who listened to his third discourse on art a common
love for the ideal and timeless over the real and transient: “Such is the warmth
with which both the Ancients and Moderns speak of this divine principle of the
art.”23 History painting, then, should be understood not simply as the attempt to
record on canvas important historical moments for their own sake, but as a way
of using particular kinds of events to express “truth” as defined by a specific historical consciousness.
American painters in the late eighteenth century took up history painting
enthusiastically. Both Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley—both of
whom started their career in the colonies but wound up in London—painted historical scenes with great success. Their contribution to the genre was to use
recent or contemporary events through which to convey the didactic messages
central to history painting. In paintings like the Death of General Wolfe (West,
1770) and the Death of Major Pierson (Copley, 1782–1784) West and Copley
demonstrated that, if the past and the present were connected to each other
through the cyclical dynamics of history itself, and if the ancients could provide
21. Patricia Burnham and Lucretia Hoover Giese, “History Painting: How It Works,” in Redefining
American History Painting, ed. Patricia Burnham and Lucretia Hoover Giese (Cambridge, Eng.:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6. Reynolds himself recognized that a painter “must sometimes
deviate from vulgar and strict historical truth, in pursuing the grandeur of his design.” In his thirteenth
discourse on art, Reynolds drew a prematurely postmodern distinction: “It is allowed on all hands,”
he told his listeners, “that facts, and events, however they may bind the Historian, have no dominion
over the Poet or the Painter. With us History is made to bend and conform to the great idea of Art.”
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert Wark (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library,
1959), 244.
22. See Stow Persons, “The Cyclical Theory of History in Eighteenth Century America,” in
American Quarterly 6 (1954), 147-163. See also Edwin Miles, “The Young American Nation and the
Classical World,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974), 259-274.
23. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 43.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
25
useful lessons to the moderns, then modern events too ought to reveal these same
timeless truths.
This innovation was not lost on West’s student John Trumbull. In his paintings
of the recently concluded Revolutionary War, Trumbull followed all the conventions of grand style history painting—dramatic action focused on heroic individuals. What should also, and obviously, be said about Trumbull’s work was that
he was the first important American painter to demonstrate that the history of the
new nation—in this case the events of the nation’s independence—was worthy
of the conventions of European history painting.
Congress commissioned Trumbull in 1817 to do a series of four murals based
on events of the Revolution to adorn the new capitol building, and in the second
of these, The Resignation of General Washington (1822–1824), Trumbull even
managed to bring back into history painting allusions to the classical, if only
indirectly. Washington’s resignation, after all, had given rise to the popular myth
that he represented our Cincinnatus. In explaining his choice of this subject to
President James Madison, Trumbull himself underscored the didacticism central
to history painting. “Sir,” he told the president, “I have thought that one of the
highest moral lessons ever given to the world, was that presented by the conduct
of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power . . . ” Madison, Trumbull
reported, agreed.24
Trumbull’s works at the Capitol, though not without their critics—in 1848
Charles Lanman, a cranky Southerner, called the works “valuable only for their
portraits”25—struck many as carrying exactly the sorts of moral and ethical
lessons that history paintings were supposed to carry. Congress had asked for
paintings that would produce a moral effect, and that’s what Congress got.
Reviewing The Declaration of Independence, a writer for the Commercial
Advertiser commented in 1818:
No inhabitant of this country can view it without experiencing a deep sense of the hazards
which the members of that illustrious assembly thus voluntarily assumed—of the anxiety,
the sufferings, the triumphant success, by which that most important transaction was followed. Before this great and decisive step was taken, the people of the States considered
themselves as only struggling against oppression—from that moment forward they contended for existence.
That view largely stuck, as in 1877 when the historical lessons of these paintings
were compared favorably to those found in books: “Trumbull’s heads tell many
a story not to be read in the pages of Bancroft.”26 In both setting and subject,
24. This exchange takes place in Trumbull’s autobiography, The Autobiography of Colonel John
Trumbull, Patriot-Artist, ed. Theodore Sizer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 258.
25. Charles Lanman, “On the Requisites for the Formation of a National School of Historical
Painting,” in Southern Literary Messenger 14 (1848), 727-730. Henry Tuckerman, writing in 1847,
didn’t much like West, Copley, or Trumbull. To West he was condescending, saying that “he seems to
have conceived of art under a kind of melo-dramatic phase,” while he accused Trumbull of being a
competent draughtsman, without a real artistic appreciation. See Henry Tuckerman, Artist-Life: or
Sketches of American Painters (New York: Appleton & Co., 1847).
26. n.a., “The Progress of Painting in America,” North American Review 124 (1877), 454.
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STEVEN CONN
these works by Trumbull seemed to signal that American history painting, with
all its didactic purpose, had arrived.27
That signal proved something of a false alarm. Painters in America did paint
in the grand manner through the first half of the nineteenth century, but history
painting in the United States never grew to occupy the “exalted rank” people
believed it would.28 The Revolution was as far forward, chronologically, as
American painters seemed willing to venture using the conventions of the grand
manner. In this sense, American history painting might well be said to culminate
with that most iconic of Revolutionary War scenes, Emanuel Leutze’s
Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), which remains among the most recognizable, most reproduced, most parodied American history paintings ever executed.29
Running through all these history paintings, from the late eighteenth century
through the first half of the nineteenth century, were common themes of individual heroism, racial conquest, and national identity. They stand as visual records
of an American vision of itself, confident and triumphant. Whether it be
Trumbull’s Jefferson courageously presenting the Declaration of Independence,
or Leutze’s Washington bravely perched in the prow of a boat fording the icy
Delaware, American history paintings permitted their viewers to renew their faith
in the American future by staring with pride at the American past.
III. AMERICAN ARTISTS CONFRONT THE CIVIL WAR, OR DON’T
In 1877, just over ten years after the war’s end, a writer in the North American
Review complained that the events of the Civil War had done nothing salutary for
the development of American painting. The chief consequence of the war for art,
27. For the best discussion of the paintings in the Capitol see Ann Uhry Abrams, “National
Paintings and American Character: Historical Murals in the Capitol’s Rotunda,” in Picturing History:
American Painting, 1770–1930 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 64-79.
28. True, by 1855, Trumbull’s four murals had been joined at the Capitol by four others, each by
a different painter. John Gadsby Chapman, The Baptism of Pocahontas at Jamestown, Virginia, 1613
(1837–1840); Robert Walter Weir, The Embarkation of the Pilgrims at Delft Haven, Holland, July 22,
1620 (1837–1843); William Henry Powell, Discovery of the Mississippi by DeSoto (1848–1855); and
John Vanderlyn, The Landing of Columbus (1837–1847) each found historical inspiration in events
that preceded the Revolution.
29. For an important discussion of Washington Crossing the Delaware, see Barbara Groseclose,
“Washington Crossing the Delaware: The Political Context,” American Art Journal 7 (November,
1975), 70-78. See also Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze 1816–1868: Freedom is the Only King
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institutions Press, 1976). Contemporary “history” did find its way
onto canvas. American painters were eager to depict scenes of discovery, exploration, and conquest,
but when they painted scenes of the historical process of westward expansion, they almost always
resorted to the general and the generic. See William Truettner, “The Art of History: American
Exploration and Discovery Scenes, 1840–1860,” American Art Journal 14 (1982), 4-31; Mark
Thistlethwaite, “The Most Important Themes: History Painting and Its Place in American Art,” in
William Gerdts and Mark Thistlethwaite, Grand Illusions: History Painting in America (Fort Worth,
TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1988), 7. Leutze’s painting was in the news at the end of 1999 when a
school district in Georgia ordered that reproductions of Washington Crossing the Delaware in district
history texts be retouched to cover up Washington’s watch-fob, which, board members feared, might
be confused with the great general’s phallus.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
27
according to the writer, was to create a huge demand for pictures among a class
that the war had made newly rich. “Works of art,” sneered the author, “became
articles of commerce.”
While American painters, and their buyers, seemed interested in scenes “of
every age and clime,” neither apparently had any taste for “the fury and medley
of the battle-field, the cries of the wounded, the horrors of the dying, and all the
picturesque and touching scenes and scenery which the eye of the soldier must
have hailed with emotion.” For this writer, the failure here was not merely artistic, it was moral. In order for the war to assume its proper meaning, it needed to
be recorded on canvas and “painters should have led the way in this patriotic
feeling.”30
At the outbreak of fighting, a writer for The Crayon had predicted that “a period of civil war is not usually a harvest time for artists . . . ,” and it is certainly
true that some artists left their studios to participate in the conflict in a variety of
ways.31 Still, many were confident that the war would provide endless material
for artists—The Crayon helpfully suggested “the parting of friends . . . the return
of the slain to Baltimore to their homes; the faces of eager recruits and earnest
debaters” as the sort of scenes from which artists could draw inspiration. A writer
for The Knickerbocker, as explicit as he was bombastic, wrote that the war must
produce great art. “Remember,” he commanded artists, “your eloquent brushes
are recording the history of a nation.” New York’s Daily Tribune agreed and
reminded its readers that the American Revolution produced “one of our greatest
painters [presumably Trumbull] whose battlepieces have never been equaled by
any of his successors.”32 Despite the warnings in The Crayon, some Americans,
at any rate, waited for the arrival of a new Trumbull.
He never came.
As I have mentioned earlier, several painters did attempt to apply the conventional techniques of grand style history painting to make didactic sense out of the
Civil War. Indeed, Bruce Chambers has called the Civil War “one of the three
great iconogenerative events in American history” (the other two being the
Revolutionary War and westward expansion), and he has documented numerous
artists and their work on both sides of the conflict.33
But “iconogenerative” may be precisely the wrong word to use when describing the Civil War production of American history painters. In fact, none of the
paintings Chambers discusses has become an icon in any significant way—certainly not to the extent that Trumbull’s scenes from the Revolution or even particular images of westward expansion have. Art historian Lucretia Giese believes
that artists felt “little responsibility to depict the conflict,” but for Mark
30. n.a., “The Progress of Painting in America,” North American Review 124 (1877), 458.
31. n.a., no title, The Crayon 8 (May, 1861), 120. Lucretia Hoover Giese lists Sanford Gifford,
Worthington Whittredge, and Temple Dix, among others, as enlistees. See Giese, “‘Harvesting’ the
Civil War: Art in Wartime New York,” in Redefining American History Painting, 65-66.
32. Both quoted in Giese,“‘Harvesting’ the Civil War,” 67.
33. See Bruce Chambers, “The Southern Artist and the Civil War,” Southern Quarterly 24 (1985),
71-94; and “Painting the Civil War as History, 1861–1910,” in Picturing History: American Painting,
1770–1930 (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 117-134.
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STEVEN CONN
Thistlethwaite the fact that history painters should have “refrained from picturing the war remains a mystery.”34 Viewed from this considerable distance, the
judgment of that anonymous North American Review critic seems remarkably
astute.
Paintings are, almost ipso facto, singular events. To speak of any artist or any
individual work of art as “representative,” therefore, is to run many risks. Still,
by looking more closely at three of the paintings Chambers himself identifies as
iconic, each of which uses the conventions of the grand manner to depict a different aspect of the war, we can not only interrogate Chambers’ claims, but we
can look at the inability of grand manner conventions to embody a historical
event of unprecedented trauma, and their inability to convey a dynamic of history no longer regarded as cyclical but now largely viewed as evolutionary.
If any painter of his generation was in a position to paint grand manner scenes
of the Civil War, Virginian William Washington was that man. He had studied in
Dusseldorf with none other than Emanuel Leutze, and had also served in some
undetermined capacity in the Confederate army.35 American painters were drawn
to Dusseldorf and to Leutze in large measure because Leutze carried on the traditions of the eighteenth-century grand manner. For Americans who wanted to
learn how to paint history, Dusseldorf was the place to go.36
On its surface, Washington’s Jackson Entering the City of Winchester
(1863–1865) bears all the hallmarks of a grand style history painting. Painted a
year after Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson rushed into Winchester to
rout General Nathaniel Banks, thus preventing a Union march on Richmond, the
canvas is filled with familiar grand manner elements. The hero, Jackson
(Washington was, after all, a Southerner), occupies center stage, and as an added
touch Washington has put him on a horse in a pose exactly mimicking so many
European equestrian statues. Jackson and his horse sit at the apex of a standard
compositional pyramid; the general is flanked on either side by townsfolk, who
greet him enthusiastically, and by soldiers. Jackson is in uniform and, while this
is not a battle scene precisely, dead and dying lie prone in the foreground of the
painting. A wounded man in the lower right-hand corner reaches out his hand in
a gesture lifted shamelessly from John Singleton Copley’s Death of Major
Pierson.
These superficial borrowings from other grand manner paintings are compounded by a second-rate execution. If it isn’t mixing metaphors to call painted
figures wooden, then these are stiff as oak. Rather than appearing as if he has just
ridden to the rescue, Jackson looks instead as if he had just performed a horse
trick to a cheering audience. That a woman weeps over a dead soldier in the
lower left-hand corner at the same time only underscores the confused emotional welter of the painting. Most comical is the wounded figure drawn from Copley.
34. Giese, “‘Harvesting’ the Civil War,” 70 and Thistlethwaite, “The Most Important Themes,” 50.
35. See Marshall W. Fishwick, “William D. Washington: Virginia’s First Artist in Residence,”
Commonwealth Magazine 19 (1952), 14-15.
36. For a discussion of Leutze and a compendium of American artists who studied with him see
Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze 1816–1868.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
29
Figure 1. William Washington, Jackson Entering the City of Winchester.
Valentine Museum/Richmond History Center.
Painted without any of the pathos of Copley’s figure, this soldier instead seems
posed as if in a musical production. He draws our eyes up to Jackson, making the
General’s pose seem more theatrical than heroic.
Constant Mayer’s Recognition (1865) does not depict a specific event, so far
as we know. Rather it contrives a scene when a wounded Confederate soldier discovers his dead, Union brother. This kind of encounter highlighted the fratricidal
nature of the war, and stories of families thus torn apart became central parts of
Civil War lore.
Mayer set his version of the story as a combination of a pieta and JacquesLouis David’s The Death of Marat. The dead brother has collapsed in a gentle S
curve, chest exposed and head slumped on his left shoulder. The wounded brother cradles the dead figure, leaning in on him from the left. The landscape is indeterminate and generic. A dead tree stump hovers ominously over the two figures
in the upper right of the canvas, but otherwise the locale has no specificity. The
figures too lack a certain individuality, and Mayer has relied on types. Johnny
Reb is bearded and wild-haired; Billy Yank is clean-shaven and more youthful.
The emotion of the picture, however, derives more from what we know the
story to be, rather than from what is conveyed to us in paint. The emotions of the
Confederate brother are not presented with any grace or depth as he stares at his
dead brother, whose own face, eyes half opened and upcast, looks rather ghoulish. The painting is intended purely to pull at the heart; it makes no attempt to
speak to the intellect as well. As a pamphlet that accompanied the painting’s
30
STEVEN CONN
Figure 2. Constant Mayer, Recognition.
The Warner Collection of Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
exhibition in 1866 put it: “Such a painting as this must always stir our feelings
with a throb of sympathy, while it melts us to pity and tenderness.”37 Pity, sympathy, and tenderness—absent here are the great moral lessons Trumbull thought
he offered the nation in the Capitol rotunda. Recognition’s maudlin, morbid sentimentality is only heightened by the painting’s absurd monumentality—nearly
five feet high by nearly eight feet across.
While neither Mayer nor Washington have come down to us today as major
painters of the mid-nineteenth century, George Caleb Bingham certainly has.
Bingham believed, like West and Reynolds, in the power of history painting to
tell the truth. “Art,” he announced, “is the most efficient hand-maid of history,”
because it has the power to “perpetuate a record of events with a clearness second only to that which springs from actual observation.”38 Yet his major Civil
War history painting, Martial Law/Order No. 11 (he did two nearly identical versions, 1865–1868 and 1869–1870) is as unsuccessful a hand-maid as those of his
fellow war painters. The event that goaded Bingham into painting, and after
which he titled the work, was an order issued in late summer 1863 by Union
General Thomas Ewing. Ewing’s forced evacuation of all persons living in
Missouri’s border counties with Kansas caused considerable chaos in those border counties, including the theft of property. the destruction of homes, and the
37. Quoted in David Park Curry, American Dreams: Paintings and Decorative Arts from the
Warner Collection (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Arts, 1997), 37. See also a brief notice of the
painting in The Jewish Messenger (March, 24, 1865).
38. Bingham quoted in John Demos, “George Caleb Bingham: The Artist as Social Historian,”
American Quarterly 17 (1965), 218-228.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
31
death of civilians. It also incensed Bingham who, though a firm Union man,
believed that Ewing’s Order 11 had crossed a constitutional line.
In attempting to make something as abstract as an administrative order the
stuff of history painting, Bingham invented a scene where General Ewing, presented in villainous profile, confronts the father, presented as an Old Testament
patriarch, of one of the families forced from its home. He and his daughters,
swooning and circled around him, are illuminated by the only shafts of light in
this otherwise shadowy, smoky composition. They are massed on the left, in
front of their home; the father thrusts his left hand out in a defiant gesture of
Figure 3. George Caleb Bingham. Order Number 11.
Cincinnati Art Museum, The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial.
“stop” at General Ewing, who occupies the middle. A small river of humanity,
those hundreds forced to the road by the order, stretches out to the horizon on the
right hand side. A black man, his hands covering his face in horror or despair,
flees the right foreground with his son, and the sky is filled with billowing, formulaic clouds of smoke.
The result is heavy-handed rather than powerful. Chambers may be right that
in composing these figures, Bingham drew from the “scientific” study of emotions and faces, but as Groseclose has observed, they stand before the viewer
“clumsy . . . imprisoned rather than encased by light.” Bingham’s formerly easy
feel for shape and line is here replaced with “stereotypical gestures.” Gone as
well is any sense of Bingham’s characteristic humor, his irony, his smirk.
Bingham may have hoped to achieve the moralizing effects of grand manner
painting, but all he manages here is a raging anger. Indeed, Bingham published
a fourteen-page screed to go along with Order No. 11, in which he denounced the
actions of General Ewing in bombastic language, in case you missed that look-
32
STEVEN CONN
ing at the painting. Having chosen a subject about which there was surely nothing funny, Bingham’s muse deserted him. Passion has been translated into “mere
melodrama,” in Groseclose’s words, and he seems to have painted Order No. 11,
“literally with a clenched fist.” Not surprisingly, the painting was attacked publicly almost immediately as a piece of partisan, anti-Union propaganda. The
image became known in the 1870s primarily because it was used against Ewing
by his Ohio political opponents when the General ran for office.39
Despite their differences of subject, these three paintings share a reliance on
the compositional conventions of grand manner history paintings—references to
pietas, and lamentations, pyramidal arrangements of figures, and so on. This
vaguely classical visual vocabulary functioned successfully in the late eighteenth
century, I suggest, because things classical were central to the way Americans
understood their relationship to the past. The allusions made and the emotions
evoked both had currency. By the mid-nineteenth century that currency had lost
its value and the classical idioms used in these paintings merely seemed out of
place. Whatever meaning the Civil War might have, it could not be elucidated
through the cyclical connection between the ancient and the modern. Though he
would become president in 1868, no one ever considered dressing Ulysses Grant
in a toga and calling him our new Cincinnatus.
It would be tedious to continue this dissection of Civil War history paintings,
though it could easily be done. These three examples, however, illustrate that no
matter what painters chose as their subject—a military hero, a battlefield tragedy,
or suffering civilians—the results fell flat. Likewise, they demonstrate that it
made little difference who handled the subject—a painter as obscure to us now
as Mayer, or as celebrated as Bingham—painters who did make the attempt to
translate the meaning of war to canvas using grand manner conventions found
themselves unable to do it with any artistic plausibility or any lasting results.
IV. THE CIVIL WAR AND THE RUPTURE OF NARRATIVE CONVENTIONS
Beyond questions of technique and execution, however, these three paintings
also illustrate why the Civil War turned out to be impossible to paint within the
established frameworks of grand style history painting.
In Washington’s case, his poor handling of paint was compounded by an
unfortunate choice of subject. His painting commemorated an event that seemed
to shrink rather than grow in significance as people reflected on the war.
Washington guessed, in 1863, that Jackson’s arrival in Winchester would be a
particularly memorable event in the course of the war, which would stand as representative of the war’s ultimate meanings. He guessed wrong. In addition, his
39. George Caleb Bingham, An Address to the Public Vindicating a Work of Art . . . (Kansas City,
MO: 1871); Chambers, “Painting the Civil War as History, 1861–1910,” and Barbara Groseclose,
“Painting, Politics, and George Caleb Bingham,” American Art Journal 10, no. 2 (1978), 17. See also
Groseclose, “The Missouri Artist as Historian,” in George Caleb Bingham (New York: Harry Abrams,
1990), 87-88. For a discussion of the politics of the painting see Nancy Rash, The Painting and
Politics of George Caleb Bingham (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 184-215.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
33
choice of hero proved doubly problematic. Not only was Jackson dead by the
time the painting was completed, but the cause for which he fought was dead as
well. This painting then, intended as a record of triumph, wound up unintentionally ironic, a record of what was not to be.
Washington’s choice of scene was not, ultimately, only the result of bad luck
and bad timing. His painting of Jackson forces us to ask: What single battlefield
moment in the war could have been represented conventionally by history painting? As countless historians have noted, the Civil War introduced mass, industrial slaughter, and it visited the war upon the non-combatants. There is no need
here to give a grim recitation of the violence—the numbers killed and maimed,
the innovations in the technology of death, and so on. Put simply, the rules of the
battlefield, the previous “narrative invention” that defined the practice of war,
changed fundamentally and irrevocably. The narrative conventions of history
painting that worked in tandem with the earlier conventions of warfare itself to
create meaning out of violence simply did not work anymore. Modern, industrialized, total war, of which the Civil War was the first, simply did not or could not
produce many Washington-Crossing-the-Delaware moments. Grand manner history painting, therefore, could not represent a battlefield it could no longer comprehend.
The Battle of Gettysburg, and specifically Pickett’s ill-fated charge, might
come closest to the kind of military moment usually recorded by history painting. Several painters, as notable as David Gilmour Blythe, and as obscure as
August Wenderoth, John Richards, and Alfred Waud, chose exactly that scene to
paint. None, however, did it with as much ambition or gusto as Peter Rothermel,
who painted Pickett’s Charge in 1871. In attempting to convey the significance
of the battle, however, all Rothermel had left was sheer scale, and this is without
a doubt the most remarkable thing about his painting. At sixteen feet by thirty
one and a half feet, Rothermel’s The Battle of Gettysburg doesn’t belong to the
genre of history painting at all, but rather to the world of large-scale panoramas
and cycloramas so popular in the nineteenth century. As a result, in the words of
Thistlethwaite, the painting “awes the viewer with its overwhelming quantity of
persons and details.” With this painting, Rothermel has said, in effect, big wars
demand big paintings, but beyond bigness there is little. In Thistlethwaite’s opinion, the painting “fails to convey effectively any quality of high-minded purpose
or value.”40 In other words, it strives to be documentary, rather than didactic; it
makes no attempt to deliver the moral lessons of history painting because those
lessons were not at all clear.
Mayer too resorted to size as a replacement for purpose. His sense of moral
confusion, though, is even more acute. Recognition played on the sorrow of a
house divided; it borrowed from and underscored the domestic metaphors used
to describe the conflict. The two literal brothers here stand in for the essential
brotherhood between soldiers from the North and South. The war has been
reduced to a tragic family fight. Yet insofar as nationalism was an essential item
40. Thistlethwaite, “The Most Important Themes,” 48.
34
STEVEN CONN
on the didactic agenda of history painting, Mayer’s brothers leave us wondering
what to make of the war. Each figure represents competing notions of national
identity. The Union, as represented here, is dead. The Confederacy, history dictated, must die too. The painting surely evoked sadness, and with that sadness
perhaps regret? The painting is silent on the question of whether the sacrifice was
at all worth it, or even what it was for. Viewers were confident, looking at
General Wolfe dying, that his death was not in vain. Here we can’t be so sure.
Like Washington, Bingham chose poorly when he painted Order No. 11. While
he regarded the order as unconscionable, it has not assumed the place of high significance in our memory of the Civil War that Bingham assumed it would. As a
result, the act of vengeance which this painting represented for Bingham rings
hollow. He described his motivations this way: “If God spares my life with pen
and pencil I will make this order infamous in history.”41 Alas, for Bingham, what
has not become famous, cannot be made infamous, nor can it be made to serve
the didactic purpose of history painting.
Order No. 11 is also a big painting, physically. But Bingham didn’t simply
resort to size to give his painting an appropriately epic quality. In addition, his
solution to the problem of how to give meaning to the war through the conventions of history painting resulted in his using virtually all the techniques and gimmicks of the grand manner at once. Here is a confrontation of “heroes,” there is
an image of Mary collapsed at the crucifixion as a woman has fallen into the arms
of her black slave; on the right is an expulsion image, and beyond that an exodus. With black smoke rising across the sky, the entire composition is portrayed
as a battle scene. If Rothermel crowded The Battle of Gettysburg with figures and
details, Bingham has crowded this painting with conventions, in a desperate
attempt to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Like the war itself,
inadvertently, this painting becomes simply a collection of loosely connected
vignettes, without any overarching coherence.
Having lost its narrative direction and its sense of didactic purpose, all that
remained for painting was documentation, though perhaps not on Rothermel’s
titanic scale. When Civil War history paintings received enthusiastic responses
from contemporary reviewers, it was often for their realism and “accuracy”
rather than for their moralizing or didacticism, as in these assessments of Julian
Scott’s Battle of Cedar Creek (1874) when it was installed in the Burlington,
Vermont city hall. One paper called it “a faithful reproduction of a real battle
scene,” while another praised Scott for being “very accurate in his drawing.”42
Accurate drawing perhaps, but these compliments sound like faint praise indeed
when measured against Sir Joshua’s standards for artistic truth.
As “faithful reproductions” history painting could not compete with photography, with the immediacy, the replicability, and the sheer volume of images produced by the camera. Robert Hughes recently echoed a common assumption that
41. Quoted in Groseclose, “Painting, Politics, and George Caleb Bingham,” 16.
42. Unidentified newspaper clippings cited in Robert J. Titterton, Julian Scott: Artist of the Civil
War and Native America (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. 1997), 110-111.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
35
photography helped do in painting during the Civil War. “The factual superiority of the camera over traditional ways of image-making could not be denied,” he
writes, “and it helps account for the scarcity of worthwhile paintings or drawings
of the Civil War.”43
Sensible as that explanation sounds, it is too simple to say that photography
succeeded where painting failed as the best way to visually represent the war.
Photography made no attempt to supplant grand manner history painting. One is
struck that photographers pioneered new subjects in their work, but in so doing
they avoided the kinds of subjects we might associate with history painting—battle scenes, generals leading charges, heroes caught at the moment of triumph or
death. This absence is surely explained in part because of the technological limits of the medium. Bulky equipment that required lengthy set-up, and plates that
needed long exposure made “action” shots unfeasible. But more than this, photography’s purposes were entirely other. Rather than attempt to make narrative
and moral sense of the war, photographs served as part of the apparatus of documentation. So many photographs have the quality of visual facts, almost natural-historical in the way they record, classify, and catalogue. We know now that
many of these photographs were staged, the bodies manipulated, and that constitutes a kind of interpretation. Still, these photographs presented themselves as
capturing unadulterated reality. They replaced timelessness with immediacy and
moral teaching with cold fact. Photographs powerfully redefined how the “real”
could be visually reproduced, but not necessdarily what was “true.”
What we must finally consider is that by the outbreak of fighting, history itself
had changed, or rather the way history was understood. If Americans of the
founding generation thought of history as cyclical, and of the new nation as being
at the beginning of a great cycle, then the Americans who suited themselves in
blue and gray thought of history as being linear, evolutionary, and as progressing
toward some inevitable, if ill-defined perfection.
Like all events of intellectual history, that shift in historical consciousness was
gradual and incomplete. Still, by the middle of the nineteenth century, as Edwin
Miles has noted, most Americans no longer regarded Greece and Rome as either
a Golden Age, or as models to be emulated, but rather as examples to be avoided.44 Advances in science and technology, which helped to distance the past from
the present, contributed to Americans’ enthusiastic embrace of a progressive
view of history. Perhaps more than any other people, Americans believed that
“faith in progress made the classical past useless and derisory.” In an essay on
“histories of art,” the art journal The Crayon told readers that “history is really
instructive only in so far as it discloses the progression of knowledge . . . ”
Progress was in the air when by 1846 J. T. Hearley could publish The Progressive
Principle, and by 1856 Samuel Shute could publish The Progress of the Race.45
43. Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1997), 272.
44. See Miles, “The Young American Nation,” especially 259, 268.
45. See Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America,” American
Historical Review 89 (1984), 909-928; and David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country
36
STEVEN CONN
This shift from a cyclical view of the past to one predicated on linear progression posed a dilemma at two levels for those who would try to use the grand manner to paint the Civil War. First, as we have already discussed, the narrative techniques of the grand manner developed precisely to express a cyclical view of history, especially in their reliance on classical conventions and vocabulary. Those
conventions—those pieta and lamentation references—no longer worked to
express a progressive conception of the past. Grand manner history painting
itself had become anachronistic by the mid-nineteenth century, and those painters
who tried it found themselves unable to use old methods to convey a new historical sense.
Complicating matters still further, even if American painters had succeeded in
making the conventions of the grand manner work to express a progressive theory of history, the Civil War stood as the great, glaring, and unarguable challenge
to any facile notion of American progress. Here was the central problem painters
faced in creating truth, in Sir Joshua’s sense, out of fact. The meaning of the war
could not be neatly conveyed as part of a great cycle in which Americans no
longer believed, or, as 600,000 dead bodies attested, as part of the evolution of
American progress. Painters using the old conventions could not resolve this
contradiction.
Neither, it should be said, could most Americans, and they dealt with the contradiction the war posed to a progressive notion of their history largely by ignoring it. As Aaron noted, shortly after the horror had subsided, North and South
“agreed that both sides were ‘right’ as well as sincere and gallant and neither
wholly to blame.” Writing in 1884, George Williams wanted to relate some of the
“many humorous incidents [that] occurred on the battle-fields,” while telling his
readers that acts of heroism “were frequent in both Federal and Confederate
armies.” By 1884 the real enemies in the war were “vagabonds,” “stragglers,”
and “skulkers,” on both sides, who would not muster the courage to fight for
either side.46 Less than twenty years after Appomattox, Williams had reduced the
colossal violence of the war to a series of quaint and amusing camp-life scenes.
Whitman in 1882 had suggested that it might be best if future generations did
not know what the “real” war was like. Five years earlier, the critic in the North
American Review worried that the war was becoming “a struggle which all are
now willing to forget.”47 Subsequent generations have proved both writers
incompletely wrong. The ways in which the Civil War was, and to this day still
is, remembered—in books and video productions, in battlefields and battle reenactments, and in hundreds of monuments around the country—verges on the
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 112-113. Stow Persons believes that the revolutionary generation would have found notions of progress “repugnant,” and his observation underscores the magnitude of the shift in historical consciousness during the first half of the nineteenth century. See Persons, “The Cyclical Theory of History,” 158; n.a., “Histories of Art,” The Crayon 4
(1857), 212.
46. Aaron, The Unwritten War, 328. George Williams, “Light and Shadows of Army Life,” The
Century Magazine 28 (October, 1884), 803-819.
47. n.a., “The Progress of Painting in America,” 459.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
37
staggering. Yet the very quantity of this remembering suggests an inadequacy to
it all. Forgetting has not quite been the problem, but rather how best to remember. Grand manner history painting had served, historically, as a form of remembrance, a visual codification of a consensus of values and meanings. Lacking
such a consensus, history painting itself became another victim of the war.48
V. EXCEPTIONS AND RULES
I have been, to this point, deliberately ignoring several paintings which might
well be called history paintings and which did succeed to some extent in capturing the public imagination, paintings which might indeed be called “iconic.” For
Southerners at least, William Washington’s Burial of Latane (1864) resonated the
way a grand style history painting was supposed to.
The story depicted in the painting was designed to pull at Southern heartstrings. We are present at the funeral of a Confederate officer. He is being laid to
rest by Southern women who, while not kin, felt it their Christian, Southern duty
to bury the man. A grieving woman dressed in black occupies the center of the
painting, forming another of those “classical” pyramids, which serves here to
create a social hierarchy. With her eyes cast mournfully toward heaven, she is
clearly the most important figure in the painting; she is flanked on one side by
other female mourners and on the other by a female child and by faithful slaves.
One slave, the only man in the composition, leans on a shovel, signifying that he
has dug the grave.
As Faust has observed, this painting embodied a definition of Confederate
nationalism. Washington has included many of its constituent parts: virtuous,
selfless women; faithful, happy slaves; and a courageous male hero willing to die
to defend the two. Washington has drawn on the conventions of grand style painting to create “a patriotic symbol” for the new Confederate nation.49 The painting
was phenomenally popular when it was displayed, first in Washington’s
Richmond studio and then in the Confederate capitol. For years after the war,
prints of the painting decorated Southern parlors.
In painting this patriotic symbol, Washington drew from a deep well. On both
sides of the Atlantic, history painting served nationalism’s agenda. West and
Reynolds understood that, and so did Trumbull and Leutze.50 Here, however,
Washington’s success in creating a symbol of Confederate nationalism, it goes
almost without saying, ensured that the painting would never occupy an imaginative space more than regional. Whatever meaning the Civil War might assume,
it could not be merely sectional, as this painting so baldly is. If the theme of
emancipation would not be represented in these paintings, then neither could
slave owning. National reconciliation after the war demanded that neither side
claim sole ownership over its nationalist implications or ultimate purpose. It had
to be, almost schizophrenically, both a triumph of union and a noble lost cause.
48. For a related observation see Giese, “‘Harvesting’ the Civil War: Art in Wartime New York,” 81.
49. Faust, “Race, Gender, and Confederate Nationalism,” 299.
50. See Renate Prochno, Joshua Reynolds (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1990).
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STEVEN CONN
Even the success Washington did achieve using the conventions of history
painting to teach a lesson about Confederate nationalism, however, came because
he undermined those conventions even while he observed them. Most obviously,
while dead and dying military heroes had always been a staple of history painting, here the hero is absent entirely, represented by a coffin—about to be buried
(pardon the pun) from view. By turning a grieving woman into the visual focus of
his work, Washington feminized what had usually been a supremely masculine
genre. Further, as Faust has argued, by placing women—and black figures secondarily—as central to a history painting at all, Washington “admits them to history; he acknowledges them as significant political actors.”51 With Burial of Latane
Washington acknowledged, even if in an inchoate way, that for history painting to
succeed in capturing the Civil War, it would have to change fundamentally.
Winslow Homer, of course, stands as the one unarguable genius whose art
emerged from the cauldron of the Civil War. His career as a wartime graphic
artist is well documented, and Homer used his observations of war to create several well-known canvases, including The Veteran in a New Field (1865), The
Bright Side (1865), and Prisoners from the Front (1866). These are the painted
images that have endured from the Civil War, the ones students still have to
memorize for their exams. As Robert Hughes recently expressed the consensus,
“Homer . . . was virtually the only artist to give some sense of [the war’s] reality, and a muted, behind-the-lines one at that.”52 Not coincidentally, none of
Homer’s Civil War canvases is a history painting in the grand manner.
Homer’s paintings succeed, where others fell flat, not simply because he abandoned the compositional conventions of history painting, though he certainly did
that. More importantly, rather than rely on the narrative conventions of an older
history painting, he invented a new language and vocabulary with which to capture historical truth. In so doing, he replaced the heroic action, moral confidence,
and didactic certainty of traditional history painting with ambiguity, ambivalence, and even irony.53
The Bright Side, Homer’s first critical success as a painter, takes what might
have been a charged subject and defuses it. He presents us, snapshot-like, with
four black teamsters dozing on the sunny side of a tent in a Union army camp. A
fifth black figure pokes his head out and looks in our direction. For those in the
North for whom the war’s meaning lay in the abolition of slavery, Homer had a
chance to make these figures heroic. He did not, and it is worth noting in this context that the theme of emancipation as the transcendent purpose of the war did
not wind up the subject of any painting now well known.54 Quite the contrary, if
51. Faust, “Race, Gender, and Confederate Nationalism,” 306. Of course, women were not unknown to grand manner history painting. Benjamin West’s Agrippina Landing at Brundisium (1767)
puts the grieving widow at the visual and moral center of the painting.
52. Hughes, American Visions, 272.
53. Goodrich recognized that Homer’s paintings were the “finest artistic record” of the Civil War,
but contained none of the usual “heroic” elements. See Goodrich, “The Painting of American History:
1775–1900,” 287.
54. Emancipation was the theme, and the title, of several high-profile, public statues. For the most
extensive consideration of these issues see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race,
War and Monument in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
39
Figure 4. Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot, 1967 (67.187.131).
Marc Simpson is right, Homer here has relied on widely understood racially
coded humor to make the painting something of a joke. Homer’s own feelings
about emancipation and race remain a mystery.55
In painting Prisoners from the Front, a more complicated genre painting than
Bright Side, Homer captured the difficulty of how to render the sectional confrontation in a history painting. Here, North and South literally confront one
another in the form of three Confederate prisoners brought before a Union officer. At first viewing some critics saw this painting as a record of Union triumph.
Eugene Benson, writing in April, 1866 for the New York Evening Post, recognized that the three Confederates represented type characters—the “audacious,
reckless, impudent young Virginian . . . the poor, bewildered old man . . . [and
the] stupid, stolid, helpless” young man—and in those types, along with the
steady, dignified Union officer, Benson saw the inevitability of Union victory:
“The basis of [southern] resistance was ignorance, typified in the ‘poor white’;
its front was audacity and bluster, represented by the young Virginian—two very
poor things to confront the quiet, reserved, intelligent, slow, sure North, represented by the prosaic face and firm figure and unmoved look of the Union officer.” Just a few weeks later, critic “E. B.” (perhaps Benson again) echoed some
of the same ideas, with small, but significant changes in language. The young
Virginian was still “audacious” but he was now “ardent” as well; the Union officer was still “firm” but he was now “dry” and “unsympathetic.”56
55. Marc Simpson, “The Bright Side: ‘Humorously Conceived and Truthfully Executed,’” in
Winslow Homer: Paintings of the Civil War (Bedford Arts Publishers for The Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco, 1988), 46-63. See also Lucretia Giese, “Winslow Homer: ‘Best Chronicler of the
War,’” Studies in the History of Art 26 (1990), 23.
56. E. B., “About ‘Figure Picture’ at the Academy,” The Round Table 3 (May 12, 1866), 295.
40
STEVEN CONN
The initial, sectional reading of the painting was not, apparently, so obvious to
later critics. A generation after the painting was done, Clarence Cook had decided that Prisoners from the Front was “strong on the side of brotherly feeling, and
of a broad humanity in the way of regarding the great struggle.” The forces of
national reconciliation erased the strictly sectional interpretation of the painting
by the 1880s, and more recently Lucretia Giese has agreed that “it is hard to read
the painting as a punitive statement . . . he gave nearly equal significance to both
sides . . . pictorially and psychologically.”57
Prisoners from the Front confused critics who wondered in what category to
place it.58 Some called it “historical art” and if we agree with that assessment
then we must also acknowledge that it is a history painting of a different and new
kind. It derives its power from its ability to express a variety of different, indeed
conflicting, messages about the war as a fratricidal catastrophe. Ambiguity, not
moralizing, lies at the heart of this painting.
Perhaps the most enigmatic of Homer’s Civil War paintings remains The
Veteran in a New Field. Compositionally it is the simplest, least crowded of the
three. A farmer, his white-shirted back to us, stands in the middle of the picture,
cutting down wheat with a scythe. The field in which he works occupies fully
three-quarters of the canvas, blue sky reduced to a narrow band at the top.
The story here seems equally uncomplicated. A veteran has returned from the
battlefields to take up his work as a farmer in the wheat fields. Because we don’t
see his face, he has no specificity and thus stands for all those soldiers, ordinary
men leading ordinary lives, who left their farms to fight. With the war over,
Homer shows us these soldiers, here singly embodied, having put down their
swords and taken up their plowshares.
The symbolism Homer has employed seems easily read. As Nicolai Cikovsky
has pointed out, Homer is playing with two well-known stories. The first surely
is the passage from Isaiah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and
their spears into pruning hooks”—and perhaps even more importantly in this context—“nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they study war
no more.” The second is the story of Cincinnatus, which, as we have already discussed, had a special meaning in the United States. After four years of terrifying
war, both sides did lay down their weapons and return to their civilian lives.59
Likewise, Christopher Wilson has demonstrated fully how current the image of
the reaper was in the popular culture of the mid-nineteenth century. Death, as a
reaper, was an image that appeared frequently during the war as each week brought
grim news of a new and tragically bountiful harvest. But as Wilson points out, “at
the end of the war, the harvest image was quickly transformed from an image of
57. Giese, “Winslow Homer: ‘Best Chronicler of the War,’“ 28. Benson and Cook quoted on 25.
58. In a fascinating bit of research, Charles Colbert argues persuasively that Prisoners from the
Front should be seen as part of a cycle of paintings that includes Sharpshooter and Defiance. He
makes this case by focusing on the figure of the poor white, who recurs in Defiance. See Charles
Colbert, “Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front,” American Art 12 (1998), 66-69.
59. See Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “A Harvest of Death: The Veteran in a New Field,” in Winslow
Homer: Paintings of the Civil War, 82-101.
NARRATIVE TRAUMA AND CIVIL WAR HISTORY PAINTING
41
death to one of life and renewal.” The Veteran in a New Field participates in this
process of transformation, according to Wilson, and the meaning of the painting is
infused with that hopefulness: “Through a single, powerful image, Homer reaffirms that the veteran’s toil and sacrifices were not in vain and that through his
efforts America had indeed experienced a new birth of freedom and prosperity.”60
Perhaps.
Without disagreeing with Wilson over the importance of the harvest metaphor,
it seems to me that the painting might be read in a more equivocal way. There is
a haunted quality to this work, something lonely and isolated about this farmer,
that mitigates against a too rosy interpretation. The wheat rises up in front of him
overwhelming and almost ominous, and while that might be seen as an emblem
of bounty, it could just as easily be read as a metaphor for the individual’s struggle against nature—a theme Homer would explore often in later works.
To read this painting simply as a celebration of the American yeomanry, which
fought the war and then returned to their farms, ignores all the ways in which the
nation they returned to was profoundly different from the one they set off to save.
For intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson, as George Frederickson noted some
years ago, war changed fundamentally their conception of what it meant to be an
American. The centrality of a transcendental individuality had been replaced
with a stress on loyalty to the group; free-wheeling experimentation with order;
individual independence with discipline.61 Read in this context, The Veteran in a
New Field could be seen as an act of mourning not only for the dead soldiers
“harvested” by war, but for a way of life, the Jeffersonian nation of yeoman farmers, that was disappearing as well. After all, just a few years after Homer painted this work, farmers with scythes would be replaced by mechanical reapers.
Finally, with his back turned to us, we have no way of taking this farmer’s
emotional temperature. If we ask questions about how the war affected him,
whether he feels traumatized or triumphant, we get no response. Wilson may
well be right that this veteran has returned effortlessly to his civilian life, his wartime work accomplished. But he may also be one of those veterans that
Sherwood Anderson remembered from his youth, whose lives were forever colored by the war, and who relived their experiences through endless re-telling. As
Anderson asked: “Is it so strange that they could not come home and begin again
peacefully painting houses and mending broken shoes? A something in them
cried out.”62 Not so strange at all, and Homer’s painting derives its power exactly from the sense that we will never know for certain.
A Europeanist friend of mine, after I explained the art-historical questions I was
wrestling with, suggested that the explanation I sought for the failure of
60. Christopher Kent Wilson, “Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field: A Study of the
Harvest Metaphor and Popular Culture,” American Art Journal 17 (1985), 19, 23.
61. George Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union,
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965). Cikovsky makes some of the same points I am making here about
Veteran in a New Field. Gone from the painting, in Cikovsky’s words, are the “consoling abstractions”
of reconciliation, providential guidance, and so on.
62. Quoted in Aaron, The Unwritten War, 340.
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STEVEN CONN
American painters to adequately capture the Civil War through history painting
might be simply that American painters were generally bad. This is, of course,
how Europeanists explain most American cultural production, but my friend’s
quip may be less glib than it first appears, whether he meant it or not.
In fact, the list of artists who tried to produce history paintings using the Civil
War does not read like an all-star cast of nineteenth-century American art:
Washington, Mayer, James Henry Beard, Henry Mosler, Julian Scott. The New
Orleans Picayune suggested that E. B. D. Julio, who painted The Last Meeting of
Lee and Jackson in 1864, simply lacked “that magic touch . . . which belongs
only to the great masters of the brush.”63 The painters of the mid-century who
wound up celebrated later in volumes of biographical sketches, and who are still
studied today, applied their talents to landscapes and genre scenes. But there may
be a chicken-and-egg dilemma in that observation. Was it simply an accident of
timing that the Civil War occurred at a low-water mark in American painting, or
was it instead the failure of these painters to do artistic justice to the war that contributes to their obscurity in the first place? If Constant Mayer or Julian Scott had
been able to paint truly iconic scenes of the Civil War, would we admire them
more today? Was it merely the failure of individual painters that accounts for the
lack of important Civil War history painting, or was it the inability of the war
itself to be painted by the old rules that is responsible?
Homer grasped that translating the war into painting meant breaking almost
entirely with the conventions of grand style history painting. In a war whose
scope was unprecedented, whose destruction was quite literally unimaginable,
and whose ultimate purpose and meaning was confused, old narrative conventions once used to make sense of very different kinds of historical events and
placed in a very different context of historical understanding failed and needed
to be replaced with new ones.
So complete was the narrative rupture effected by the Civil War that even so
simple a representational task as portrait painting had become impossible, at least
in Walt Whitman’s estimation. In a short paragraph in Specimen Days, he complains that there is “no good portrait of Lincoln.” He goes on to say that Lincoln’s
face contained such a complexity of expressions and emotions—perhaps like the
war itself—that while it had little by way of “technical beauty . . . to the eye of
a great artist it furnished a rare study, a feast and fascination.” Alas, no such artist
did justice to that face, according to Whitman, and in a conclusion that might
stand for all attempts at grand style history painting, he wrote: “The current portraits are all failures—most of them caricatures.”64
Ohio State University
63. Quoted in Harold Holzer and Mark Neely, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Civil War in
Art (New York: Orion Books, 1993), 150.
64. Whitman, Specimen Days, 42. Of course some would argue that we do indeed have wonderful
portraits of Lincoln, but they are photographic.