All News & Blogs Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit brings
fresh meaning to Civil War imagery Union soldier-artist Julian
Scott painted 'Surrender of a Confederate Soldier, 1873.' View
More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place Our public
preferred great landscapes, which spoke to our continent-
spanning ambitions and pride of place, and folksy scenes of
domestic life. Yet even before war was declared, artists
incorporated current events into such works, though more subtly
than we're now used to. Frederick Douglass, in a June 1861
address, described race slavery as North America's moral
volcano, due to erupt explosively. Abraham Lincoln supposedly
said of the looming cataclysm, "I see a storm coming." So, not
surprisingly, portents of change in the form of storm clouds,
crimson skies, burned trees and smoking volcanoes swiftly
populated landscape paintings. Viewers understood the metaphors.
Before Fort Sumter, there were even horizontal fireballs evoked
by Walt Whitman's poem "Year of Meteors" and