No camera of the 1860s could catch a battle, so painters had to rebuild the fighting of the Civil War, sometimes from far away. The month Lincoln was shot, a painted storm owned by his assassin's brother hung in a New York exhibition, and a poet wrote about it. In Paris, a painter who never saw the fight had already put an American sea battle on canvas.
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How These Were Chosen
The Civil War killed more than 600,000 soldiers, and almost none of its fighting was photographed. A camera of the 1860s needed several seconds of exposure, so photographers came after the battle, to record the dead and the ruins.
Painting could rebuild a charge. It could also show what surrounded the fighting: the wait in camp, the wife at home, the family running toward the Union lines. After 1865, it joined the argument over what the war had meant.
Each picture here was made during the war or in the years when its meaning was still disputed, and shows the war or the people it reached. A battle scene was never required, and several reached a wide public in their own day, through exhibitions and prints. Photographs were left out.
12. Eastman Johnson, The Girl I Left Behind Me (about 1872)
Wind pushes the fair hair and dark cape of a young woman to the left as she stands alone on a ridge above a misty valley, a red petticoat showing below her hem. No soldier, uniform or weapon appears anywhere. Only the title ties her to the Civil War.
That title came from a song. "The Girl I Left Behind Me" was an old Irish tune that became a favorite regimental ballad during the war, sung by men as they marched away from home, and its words belong to the soldier. Eastman Johnson turned the song around. He painted the person it is about, the woman who stayed, at a moment when the man is already gone.
Her hands tell the rest. One presses a stack of books, held by a strap, against her chest, and the other holds her hat. On the hand with the books is a wedding ring, the sign of a husband away at war. The split-rail fence that zigzags below her, with the fog closing in, is often read as a country still divided.
Johnson painted her about 1872, seven years after the war had ended. By then the waiting was over, and the canvas turns it into a memory: a young wife alone on a path that trails off in front of her.
At a Glance
Artist: Eastman Johnson (1824 to 1906)
Painted: About 1872
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 106.7 × 88.7 cm (42 × 35 in)
Where to see it: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
11. Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field (1865)
With his back turned, a man swings a long blade into a wall of ripe wheat that crosses the whole canvas. It is 1865, the war has just ended, and the picture looks like a plain harvest. Yet the blade in his hands is not the tool a farmer of the period would have carried.