Hello I'm Eleanor Harvey the senior
curator at the Smithsonian American Art
Museum and I organized the exhibition
the Civil War and American Art. This
podcast concerns six paintings that are
in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's
permanent collection the Civil War is a
gigantic topic and I chose to focus on
one particular aspect to try to answer
the question
that in the middle of the war between
1861 and 1865 when often you didn't know
how the war was going who was winning
what would happen next what exactly do
you paint history painting comes after
the fact cavalry charges generals on
horseback but during the middle of the
war it was hard to sort out what was
going on the telegraph meant that you
got daily reports from the battlefield
photography which was a brand new medium
meant that for the first time Americans
saw pictures of dead soldiers strewn
across the landscapes of Antietam and
Gettysburg the immediacy of that
information both visual and intellectual
meant that this war was not one that
could be romanticized easily and so
artists had to look elsewhere in order
to engage with the war while it was
under way so for this exhibition I chose
to focus on the way that genre painters
looked to the human cost of the war with
soldiers and african-americans striving
to find a future in the wake of the
horrors of war but most of all I wanted
to focus on the landscape painters often
we don't think of them as having
anything to do with the Civil War they
didn't paint battlefields they didn't
paint soldiers but what they did
epitomized the emotional rollercoaster
of the mood of the nation at the time
because when people talked about the war
when they wrote about it whether it was
in sermons or poems newspaper editorials
political speeches or in Diaries and
letters the terms they used to describe
how they were feeling were couched in
the
scape and in the weather as a result
storms raged floods rose volcanoes
erupted comets and Aurora's split the
skies and it was as though the world as
we knew it was coming apart at the seams
it is this rich vocabulary of
destruction and emotion that the
landscape painters picked up on and
their works become the emotional
barometer for the mood of the nation
you
