As children we often played pretend games resembling war: cops and robbers, snowball fights, nerf gun battles. Team versus team, plans of attack, exasperated cries of pretend dying, a victor, and laughs all throughout. The brothers and sisters we fight against remain our friends at the end of the day; peacefully, we fall asleep and dream of the world. Real war is nothing like pretend war. Even one death carries with it an eternal weight that burdens those who remain. Maybe you know this weight. Now, imagine the void that thousands and thousands of deaths can cause. Maybe you don’t have to. Perhaps one of the most tragic wars in American history was the American Civil War. Brother killed brother, and a land was torn against itself. One can imagine the anger, confusion, sorrow, and grief that sprouted across the nation as this war progressed. Overall, about 620,000 men lost their lives. For a comparison, that is about three times the size of Chattanooga Tennessee’s population in 2024.
This exhibition, through the brief selection of paintings below, attempts to confront a nation’s greatest crisis and imagine its reconstruction through landscape paintings, photography, and human narratives. The volcano Cotopaxi presented first is meant to evoke the beauty, peace, and wonder prior to the Civil War. Immediately following is a photograph that jolts the viewer into the sudden violence of war. The next two landscapes are examples of how artists expressed the darkness of the war they lived through. Church’s View of Cotopaxi is a very different scene from his Cotopaxi and best reflects how the war changed the work of American artists. The Burial of Latané demonstrates how the war morphed art into mediums of propaganda. Finally, the last two works wrestle with the idea of life after war.
Frederic Edwin Church, View of Cotopaxi, 1857, oil on canvas, 62.2 × 92.7 cm (24 1/2 × 36 1/2 in.), Art Institute Chicago Accession Number: 1919.753
Church was an American Landscape painter who captured absolute magnificence in his works. Here is one rendition among Church’s several pieces of the Cotopaxi volcano. It represents the grandness, power, and wonder of creation. In this exhibition, it is an important contextual piece when considering the third selected work. This piece represents all the works before the Civil War, untouched by a context of violence and brutality. Here is the calm before the storm, the peace before war, and an underlying fear of eruption.
Timothy H. O’Sullivan, A Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1863, albumen silver print from glass negative, 17 13/16 × 22 1/2 in. (45.2 × 57.2 cm), The Met Accession Number: 2005.100.1201
Photography came to America in 1839 and was most commonly used for portraiture. The snapshot reality that photographs captured revolutionized news, challenged the work of traditional artists, and incorporated the public in a new, more intimate way. Here, the quick (relatively) recreation of such a brutal and real scene signifies the suddenness in which war can begin, people can die, and lives can be changed. These kinds of photos replicated in the newspapers brought the unfiltered violence and loss that comes with all wars into the lives of daily Americans.
Frederic Edwin Church, Cotopaxi, 1862, oil on canvas, 48 × 85 inches (121.9 × 215.9 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts Accession Number: 76.89
Here is another of Church’s representations of the Cotopaxi volcano. This one, however, is the only one he painted as fully erupting. The tranquility in View of Cotopaxi, the peace before the war, has now exploded into fear and chaos. Ash filling the upper right quadrant of the piece is reminiscent of the smoke from canons and muskets. The red hue bathing the scene is much like all of the blood spilt during battle. An off-centered canyon filling with gushing water visualizes the rage and destruction of war.
Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Coming Storm, 1863 (retouched and redacted in 1880), oil on canvas, 28 × 42 inches (71.1 × 106.7 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art Accession Number: 2004.115.1
Much like Church, Gifford returned several times to paint the Catskill Mountains. This rendition has a much darker atmosphere than his other pieces. Finished two years after the Civil War began, Gifford epitomizes emotions across the nation through a huge, ominous storm that will inevitably break the surface of the serene lake. The absence of the sun, the dying of the greenery, and the thickness of the thunderheads all contribute to the darkness that has overcome the American peoples.
William D. Washington, The Burial of Latané, oil on canvas, 38 x 48 inches, 1864, The Johnson Collection
The Burial of Latané is an example of how the Civil War contributed to shaping the message of art: paintings as propaganda. This work is a hybrid form of genre painting —it is both historical and narrative— with the goal to demonstrate desirable Southern traits within the Confederacy. The slaves on the viewer’s left are depicted as loyal workers grieving the loss of their beloved master. Most know that the relationship between slave and master during this period was not so compassionate. The presence of the women and the adornment on the coffin contribute to honor and devotion. Latané’s death symbolized how the Confederates retained their virtues under major duress.
Winslow Homer, Prisoners from the Front, 1866, oil on canvas, 24 x 38in. (61 x 96.5cm), The Met Accession Number: 22.207
Prisoners from the Front summarizes the combating forces of the American Civil War. Homer was inspired by the victory of his friend, a Union Army general who captured a division of Confederate soldiers in 1864. To the right, a lone Union officer stands casually in his well-groomed uniform. Perhaps he has taken on a lecturing countenance, or maybe he looks at the ragamuffins before him with disappointment. Those four ragamuffins represent the Confederacy, standing with pride even after defeat.
Winslow Homer, The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 38 1/8in. (61.3 x 96.8cm), The Met Accession Number: 67.187.31
Finally, Winslow Homer’s Veteran in a New Field ends with a note of contemplation. A Union soldier alone in a field, the war now finished, returns to the rhythms of life. He still has the jacket to his uniform, set aside in the bottom right quadrant— a symbol that war never really ends. This soldier will have to continue living with the weight of death upon his shoulders, blood on his hands, and a victory at a terrible cost. This scene echoes the words of Isaiah 2, “... and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they lean on war anymore.” A day is coming when all the wars of this world will end, and we will be satisfied to return to the good works of the field.
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