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The article examines the work of the American artist Winslow Homer. Particular focus is given to his depictions of the American Civil War in his paintings and prints. Additional topics discussed include his 1871 painting "Rainy Day in Camp," his work creating political cartoons during the war and his depictions of mules in his art.

Although James's first published response to Whitman's poetry, an 1865 review of Drum-Taps, was dismissive, he expressed a profound affinity with the poet later in his career. This essay considers how his reading of two volumes of Whitman's correspondence in 1898, in particular The Wound Dresser letters, are crucial to James's reevaluation of Whitman and may be seen to be exerting pressure in The American Scene (1907). Through also examining a key event of the year previous, when James's Civil War memories were reignited by the dedication of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston, I suggest reasons for his changed relation to Whitman's aesthetic project. My argument focusses on how Whitman's epistolary and poetic treatment of the wounded body reformulated vital representational and emotional issues for James, and made Whitman an active presence for him during his 1904–5 American sojourn. James makes no explicit comment about Whitman when he details his journey in The American Scene, yet the poet's influence can be felt in the way James writes about recently erected Civil War monuments by Saint-Gaudens, in New York and Boston, and Whitman is also acknowledged by the stylistic memorial, in this work, that James builds for him. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay about the effects of the U.S. Civil War on children as depicted in the paintings of Eastman Johnson is presented. It discusses Johnson's portrayal of domesticity in the U.S. during the period of the civil war, the psychological value of children during the Civil War as shown by Johnson in his paintings and how Johnson combined art and social commentary through his paintings, such as "The Blodgett Family."

In this article, the author discusses the work of the American landscape and marine painter Fitz Henry Lane. Focusing on the period between 1848 and 1865, the author argues that Lane's paintings, especially those he created while on numerous trips to the state of Maine, indirectly address the precarious political situation in the U.S. in the years leading up to the Civil War. More specifically, it is argued that various political issues, including the virtues of free as opposed to slave labor, the importance of cardinal directionality with respect to questions of national territory, and the need to heal a divided nation, structure some of the most important formal and iconographic features of Lane's work at this time.

An essay is presented concerning the interpretive history of the painting "General Order No. 11" by U.S. painter George Caleb Bingham and the remembered history of the U.S. Civil War in Missouri. It analyzes responses to the painting from newspaper editorials, descriptive accounts of the painting, and scholarship. It also discusses the life, work, and political views of Bingham. The article analyzes the white supremacist, reconciliationist and emancipationist interpretations of the painting.

The article discusses the relationship between human bodies and the landscape in art depicting the U.S. Civil War, with a particular focus on the stereograph "Wounded Trees at Gettysburg" by Mathew Brady. According to the author, Brady and other artists explored the connections between bullet-riddled trees and the wounded bodies of soldiers and drew on images and concepts from the art of the Romantic period in order to understand 19th-century warfare. Details on the symbolic relationship between trees and longevity are also presented. Other topics include anthropomorphism and sculptures and illustrations depicting the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg.

The article discusses the history of cyclorama exhibitions in Portland, Oregon in the late 19th century, with a particular focus on Portland's "Gettysburg" cyclorama exhibition. The article provides an overview of the Portland Cyclorama Company's role in establishing Portland's cyclorama exhibitions. The relationship between Portland's cyclorama exhibitions and the U.S.'s collective memory of the U.S. Civil War, including aspects of heroism, sacrifice, martyrdom and reunion of the Confederacy with the Union, is discussed.

The article focuses on three contemporary vernacular landscapes which memorialize the American Civil War and antebellum culture: Pennsylvania's Gettysburg National Military Park, the slave market at Forks of the Road in Natchez, Mississippi, and the housing development named Union Station, in LaGrange, Ohio. The author discusses the use of the sites as a means to combat cultural and economic marginalization in the present day, and its representation of the constant redefinition of the Civil War history. Accordingly, the author explores the issues related to the creation of the memorialization projects such as the impact of heritage and the National Park Service (NPS) restoration of Gettysburg. She considers land use' role in forging collective memories of the war.

Although most artists ignored the American Civil War (1861-1865) as overt subject matter, Winslow Homer (1836-1910) did not. His paintings of wartime garnered him professional attention. Why then in 1865 should he have painted Old Woman Gathering Faggots, a seemingly French subject rarely dealt with by Americans? First, Homer was ambitious and competitive and naturally experimental. Beyond that, Homer was active in the New York art scene during the war years, a friend of many fellow artists, including painter/critic Eugene Benson (1839-1908), and mindful of critical discussions of the time. These focused on merits of landscape vs. genre painting and the consequences of subject matter. Possibly, in reaction, Homer began to address broader and weightier matters in his paintings. This article examines the larger question of what Homer's unusual choice of iconography for Old Woman Gathering Faggots meant to him and to mid-nineteenth-century America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Royal Scottish Academician Joseph Noel Paton (1821-1901), famous for his fairy and religious paintings, also produced a powerful yet forgotten series of drawings on slavery primarily between 1857 and ca. 1863. These appeared in Bond and Free: Five Sketches Illustrative of Slavery, a book-cum-portfolio. The quintet was photographed by Thomas Annan and offered to members/subscribers of the Art-Union of Glasgow. The subject was clearly linked to the American Civil War, but accompanying biblical verses generated diverse meanings. The inclusion of mixed-race figures, especially women, is significant, as are connections with contemporary abolitionist literature. Verbum Dei (Word of God), The Sale, The Capture, The Rescue, and Freedom represent separate phases, but only three formed an abbreviated narrative when published in 1865 in the Sunday Magazine. I analyze the visual encoding of each of the five images with special emphasis on the unusual message and vision of a new social order in the post-emancipation scene Freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the experiences of U.S. landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church during the U.S. Civil War. Various exhibitions of Church's work before and during the conflict are examined, with the author noting that Church sought an international audience for his paintings. The ways in which Church advocated for the cause of the Union in various patriotic works are explored as well.

The essay analyzes the depiction of the Union Army occupation of the Westover plantation in Virginia by U.S. painter Edward Lamson Henry in the painting "Westover, Virginia." The author is primarily interested in the ways in which Henry depicted the interactions between two separate cultures: the Northern U.S. military and the Southern U.S. aristocracy.

Close collaboration enables an art historian and paper conservator to attribute a hitherto-unknown Civil War drawing of Berdan Sharpshooters at Yorktown to Winslow Homer. Contrasts between this drawing and other Homer illustrations for Harper’s Weekly during the Yorktown Campaign of 1862 shed new light on the issue of wartime censorship. The drawing’s relationship to other Civil War work by Homer, in particular his first oil, Sharpshooter (1863), and a much later sketch illustrating the artist-correspondent’s perception of sharpshooters at Yorktown as murderers, also shows as never before the profound effect of this wartime experience on his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Civil War forced many southern women into the public sphere of war materiel production, factory labor, and hospital work, jobs that previously had been part of the male sphere. This article examines how Confederate newspaper editors framed such work for women and argues that the majority of southern editors not only recognized the necessity of women's moral, patriotic, and physical contributions to the war but frequently encouraged and applauded such actions. In an era of separate gender spheres, southern editors promoted women's war work as part of the existing southern and Confederate values of self-sufficiency, hard work, paternal devotion, and sacrifice for the new nation. Examining such press representations is important because Confederate editors played crucial roles in shaping public opinion during the war and in temporarily reconstructing gender roles during wartime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues for the central importance of the ‘gag’ to Winslow Homer's early paintings, made during the American Civil War. As his entrée into the New York art world in these years Homer creates a form of visual deadpan that spoke to the ‘comical and coffinly’ circumstances of the war, resonated with the methods of the period's controversial platform comedians, and answered the critical call for a ‘higher sort of humor’ that moved beyond the antics of the antebellum comic mode of the 1850s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that the American Civil War imagery in trompe l'oeil paintings complemented other memorializing artifacts of the period. Revealing deceptions in artistic renditions; Remembering acts; Formulation of expansive social unity; Samples of Civil War paintings.