Smithsonian gathers best art of Civil War era
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WASHINGTON (AP) - Paintings and photographs depicting the raw reality of the United States (US) 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 1861 to 1865 war transformed America.
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.
The Civil War And American Art is on view in Washington through April and then moves to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
