Life during wartime

In a revelatory exhibit, artist-reporters capture Civil War’s mundanity and horror

October 02, 2009|Sebastian Smee, Globe Staff

(Page 4 of 4)

Some of those drawings are little more than diagrams - attempts at sketching out the topography and arrayed forces in a given battle; they come with written notations to clarify things for the engravers.

But many have real artistic merit. You can’t help but admire, for instance, the subtlety of observation and the variety of hatched pencil marks in Charles Soule Jr.’s “Camp Sherman’’ or Frederic Schell’s “Siege of Vicksburg: Soldiers at Work on the Fortifications.’’

Schell’s “Chattanooga Valley Sketched from Lookout Mountain after Sherman’s Victory’’ is a rare rendering in ink wash. It shows the battlefield from atop the mountain, the haze of the day obliterating almost all signs of the massacre that had just taken place.

War takes place, a work like this reminds us - and then it is over, just like the unlucky lives it sucks into its thumping madness.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com

Correction: Because of a reporting error, a review of the exhibition "First Hand: Civil War Era Drawings from the Becker Collection” at the McMullen Museum of Art that appeared in the "G" section on Oct. 2 incorrectly identified the setting of actions in Stendhal's novel "The Charterhouse of Parma." The setting was the Battle of Waterloo.