Bombardment of Fort Moultrie, Charleston Harbor, South Carolina (1864)

The Civil War and American Art exhibit ended its run at the National Portrait Gallery a few weeks back and is currently under installation at the Metropolitan Museum here in the Big Apple. It will be showing all summer and is well worth the trip. Though I saw it in DC, I intend to go back–probably more than once–during its time here in Gotham. There are many great works in the show; my favorites were the landscapes of Conrad Wise Chapman, a Virginian who lived with his family in Italy prior to the war with his artist father. The Chapman works on display in this sesquicentennial show are primarily landscapes he painted for the Ordinance Bureau during the Confederate defense of Charleston Harbor. On the simplest level the paintings work as literal representations of Confederate camp life during the siege, just as Winslow Homer’s sketchings depicted the quotidian life of Union soldiers. Chapman’s works are more than that though. Whatever his thoughts on secession, slavery, and the other issues of the day, Chapman was an artist of the first order. He reminds me of the Dutch Masters in his use of natural light. He was equally adept at depth and scale.

Chapman was all but forgotten in the decades after Appomattox. Southerners, impoverished by the war’s destruction, did not have the financial resources to buy art the way their Northern counterparts did. The overt Confederate imagery was another minus in the art market of the Gilded Age. Chapman remained active throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mainly living as an expatriate in Mexico and Europe. Most of the Charleston Series ended up in the care of the Museum of the Confederacy in 1898. Chapman lived another twelve years and died in poverty in 1910. Now we may be entering something of a Chapman renaissance. First, there was his place in the Civil War and American Art exhibition. Now, Sotheby’s is auctioning one of his postwar paintings, Paisaje del Valle de Mexico con el Lago de Texcoco, later this month. The landscape is projected to sell for a cool $125,000-175,000.

(image/Gibbes Museum of Art)

I mentioned yesterday that I went to Albany this past Saturday to see the New York State Museum’s mammoth exhibit, An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War. There have been many excellent exhibits throughout the sesquicentennial, and I must say that this makes the short list of the very best. Here are some highlights.

Frederick Douglass, circa 1845

This daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass is believed to be the first visual image taken of the publisher/abolitionist. Note how young he looks. Upstate New York was a hotbed of abolitionism in the decades prior to the war. The region was also one of the key routes of the Underground Railroad. John Brown, of course, lived in the area.

Erie Canal plaque, 1825

The scale is difficult to make out because there is nothing beside it with which to compare, but this plaque was about 2 feet tall and three feet wide. It is from the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. The Erie Canal is something of a forgotten part of American history, but it was instrumental in tying the Atlantic Seaboard to the Midwest. I had never associated the two in my mind but, coincidentally or not, New York State abolished slavery two years after the canal’s opening.

Again the scale is tough to make out, but this campaign poster from 1860 measured about three by five feet. I loved the reference to Edwin Morgan, who won the New York gubernatorial race and was hugely influential in raising men and materiel for the Union cause.

Currier and Ives memorial certificate

The photograph did not come out well but this object was so moving that I had to include anyway. Currier and Ives sold such certificates to the loved ones of those killed in the war. I imagine these were common, being an inexpensive way to commemorate the loss of a son, husband, or brother. If the soldier was buried far away, as many of course were, a lithograph of a headstone hanging in the parlor would have to do.

U.S. Substitute & Volunteer Agency

“Substitutes furnished”

“Facts for Men who Do Their Own Thinking”

This was a pro-Lincoln broadside from the 1864 election versus McClellan.

Returned Volunteer/How the Fort Was Taken, 1864

Sculptor John Rogers created many works with an abolitionist and Civil War motif before, during, and after the conflict. (See here from the New-York Historical Society.) The swords into plowshares reference is easy to intuit. Like the Currier & Ives certificates, these would have been low-cost ways for people to remember the war. Returned Volunteer remained in the Rogers’s catalog until 1889, a quarter century after it was first produced.

Spring

There was so much in the museum I had to step out and recharge my batteries. The people at the museum said it was unusually slow because the weather was so nice. Having left the house at 6:00 am to get the train from Penn Station to Albany, I was quite hungry. So, taking the advice of the museum folks, I headed to Lark Street for lunch. You have to pack it in on these day trips.

Elmer E. Ellsworth, 1837-1861

Another difficult one to make out, but this handbill commemorated Elmer Ellsworth’s one hundredth birthday in 1937. I found this interesting because it shows that the Civil War was not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. I mean, it’s from the FDR-era for heaven’s sake.

One for the Hayfoot

. . . and the pièce de résistance: the chair from Grant’s Cottage in which he raced against the clock to finish his memoirs before he died.

All-in-all it wasn’t a bad Saturday. You can catch An Irrepressible Conflict  at the New York State Museum in Albany through September 22. It is a long train trip from the city, but then again there is only one Civil War sesquicentennial.

The new Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Hey everybody, it is Sunday morning. The Hayfoot left for work awhile ago. I’m sitting here having my Sunday coffee. Things are returning to a semblance of normalcy here in Gotham. We went to the Barnes Foundation yesterday with our friend Charles. I’m still trying to process the new versus the old Barnes. More in a later post. Actually we had quite the adventure yesterday. We left Brooklyn at 6:15, got on the subway to the transfer point to catch the shuttle bus into Manhattan; at this time there was no subway service across the river because the tubes had been flooded during Hurricane Sandy. Either due to poor planning or manpower exhaustion there were not enough buses and personnel when we arrived at the shuttle still before 7:00 am. Buses were coming one by one to take thousands of commuter into the city. This was in contrast to Thursday and Friday when there was  a significant police and transportation presence during the commute. My impression is that they were not expecting that many people so early in the morning. I give the city the benefit of the doubt; they have been overworked this past week. Still, the pushing shoving easily could have escalated into something worse. That it was a chilly November morning was fortunate; had it been a steamy day in the dog days of August we might might well have had a tragedy on our hands as tempers rose with the heat.

Once on the bus we were texting Charles our progress. We had to catch the Boltbus near NY Penn Station at 8:15 to get to Philadelphia. Once there, things were anticlimactic. The bus ride was uneventful. The one thing worth noting were the LONG gas lines we saw at the rest stops in New Jersey. I’m not sure everyone thought they’d be smart by going to the turnpike gas stations to fill up; if that was their plan, it didn’t work. It is always fun leaving the city for a day trip, especially after the events of the previous week. I have mixed feelings, to say the least, about the relocation of the Barnes from Merion to Philadelphia, but the artwork itself is something to behold. Again, more on this after I’ve had some time to think it through.

Counting our blessings.

(image courtesy of Small Bones via Wikimedia Commons)

The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama

I just booked the bus tickets to take the Hayfoot and a friend to the Barnes Museum in early November. We visited the old Barnes four years ago and are eager to see what they have done with the new facility. I have heard mixed reviews. Another great museum in the City of Brotherly Love is the Philadelphia Art Museum. One of the works in its collection is Manet’s The Battle of the U.S.S. “Kearsarge” and the C.S.S. “Alabama.”  For some reason the exhibition catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2003 show Manet and the American Civil War came through my in box the other day. Alas this one somehow fell under my radar nine years ago, probably because I returned to graduate school in January ’03 and was too busy. I am sitting here having my Sunday coffee entranced by the story of Manet and the Kearsarge. The Met Museum website explains:

On June 19, 1864, the United States warship Kearsarge sank the Confederate raider Alabama off the coast of Cherbourg, France, in one of the most celebrated naval engagements of the American Civil War. The battle was widely reported in the illustrated press and riveted public attention on both sides of the Channel. When Kearsarge later anchored off the French resort town of Boulogne-sur-Mer it was thronged by curious visitors, one of whom was the artist Édouard Manet. Although he did not witness the historic battle, Manet made a painting of it partly as an attempt to regain the respect of his colleagues after having been ridiculed for his works in the 1864 Salon. Manet’s picture of the naval engagement and his portrait of the victorious Kearsarge belong to a group of his seascapes of Boulogne whose unorthodox perspective and composition would profoundly influence the course of French painting.

It is a fascinating story on many levels, artistically, socially, diplomatically, and otherwise. For one thing it is often lost on us that the rest of the world, or at least Europe, was paying attention to our Civil War. It makes one see Manet with a different perspective as well.  Check it out here, and enjoy your Sunday.