Embattled Pictures: Union Soldier-Artists Envision Combat in the Civil War

Union soldiers in the Civil War entered into not only armed warfare with their Confederate adversaries, but unknowingly into a cultural contest with other Unionists. Soldier-artists produced war art within the context of a prevailing heroic narrative which William Thompson identifies in his examination of the wartime press. Scholars generally contend that artists felt little responsibility to depict the conflict, but a consideration of soldiers’ war art challenges this notion. Soldiers used visual culture as an effective medium with which to convey the combat experience, an aspect of service that they frequently conceded was textually indescribable. Some soldiers fortified existing conventions relating to the heroic depiction of battle, using idealized illustrations to justify their service. Others found patriotic symbolism untenable in the face of increasingly mechanized warfare, abandoning popular strategies in search of new ways to represent the war’s violence. As they created war art and depicted Americans in battle, soldier-artists identified the fissures in celebrated martial values such as masculinity, courage, and piety.

Soldiers’ artworks were not mere products of the historical moment, but emphatic statements about it. I marry soldier studies with art history to demonstrate this. Two dissimilar soldier-artists, Alfred Mathews (31^st Ohio) and Adolf Metzner (32^nd Indiana), and their depictions of the Battle of Stones River (1862) will be employed as comparative case studies in a broader exploration of the competing cultures of war. This paper aligns with Peter Carmichael’s recent study by exhibiting that volunteers’ pragmatic approach to soldierly service was as an artistic endeavor as well as a behavioral and written one. Soldiers contributed to a nuanced, grassroots record of the war that ran parallel to the mainstream narrative. Those who abandoned popular stylistic strategies foreshadowed distinguished contemporaries who are recognized for pioneering modern war art and literature, like Winslow Homer and Ambrose Bierce.