Smithsonian gathers best Civil War era art WASHINGTON —
Paintings and photographs depicting the raw reality of the Civil
War marked a major change in American art that tossed out
romantic notions of war. Some of the finest artists of the day,
including Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Frederic Church and
Sanford Gifford, painted landscapes and scenes of everyday life
to show how the war transformed the nation. Their best works,
along with some of the first photographs of soldiers killed on
the battlefield, have been gathered by the Smithsonian American
Art Museum for a major exhibition on how artists represented the
war and how the war changed art. It’s on view in Washington
through April and then moves to New York’s Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Curator Eleanor Jones Harvey spent years researching the
project and borrowing many of the 75 works featured in the show.
It features Civil War scenes from Washington, Baltimore, New
York, and points south at Fort Sumter, Charleston, Georgia and
Virginia. Rather than ma