William Blake Exhibition Catalog 2022 - Flipbook - Page 5
William Blake, Winslow Homer,
and the Long Civil War
BY: SARAH BURNS
Washington Crossing the Delaware | Emanuel Leutze | 1851
Sharpshooter | Winslow Homer | 1863
How to paint the war: this was the urgent question contemporary
victorious battles and their heroes—had failed to gain much traction
artists, critics, and viewers grappled with during and after the years of
in the antebellum United States. Indeed, during the Civil War
bloody and bitter conflict between North and South. Critics complained
itself, Emanuel Leutze’s monumental history painting Washington
that for the most part, American painters seemed to continue on just as
Crossing the Delaware (exhibited at the 1864 Metropolitan Fair in
they had during the antebellum decades, favoring untarnished landscapes
New York) prompted one writer to dismiss the work as “a striking
and entertaining scenes of daily life over renderings of heroic or tragic
representation of the school that is dying out.” Some, however,
exploits on the battlefield. In fact, a significant number of artists did
particularly the critic Eugene Benson, had a different and more
paint incidents of the war, but their efforts for the most part fell flat.
challenging perspective on the subject. American historical art,
Benson argued, should be “art that shall become historical, not art
As many have noted, European-style “history painting”—meaning
those commandingly large, dramatic, and idealized spectacles of
that is intended to be so.” Historical art, in other words, was
contemporary art.
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