Saturday, October 12, 2019 • 2:00 PM – Admission $10.00, Members Free
Art & Photography of the Civil War
ART AND PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR will focus on the effects of the Civil War on American landscape and genre painting, and on the new (at the time) medium of photography.
We will look at the large range of works created before (slavery, racism), during (lives of soldiers, battles), and following the Civil War war (Negro struggles, reconstruction). We will look at work by some of America’s finest artists including Hudson River School painters like Frederick Church (metaphorical paintings of the War) and Sanford Gifford (a soldier during the Civil War – lives of the soldiers); genre painters, William Sidney Mount and Eastman Johnson (lives and struggles of slaves); journalists like Winslow Homer whose works relating to the lives of soldiers were published in Harper’s Weekly; and finally the photographs bringing Abraham Lincoln to vivid life as well as the horrors of war by famed photographers Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and George Barnard.
We will address how these works of art not only unleashed historical events of a great historical moment, but also wrought great changes in the nation’s visual culture and character.