Professor Vanessa Schulman’s most recent book, Art during Wartime: Painting Everyday Life in the Civil War North, was recently published by The University of Chicago Press. The book examines artistic representations of daily life during the American Civil War. Jochen Wierich, Curatorial Director at the Brinton Museum and an expert in the history of American painting, writes, “Schulman’s book makes a compelling argument that Civil War genre paintings absorbed, reflected, and shaped broader concerns around gender, race, and disability. Art during Wartime is a brilliant addition to the scholarship on painting in nineteenth-century America. Patricia Johnston, a professor of art history at the College of the Holy Cross, calls Schulman’s book “an essential contribution to American art history.”
From the publisher’s website:
While the Civil War raged on, many northern artists depicted everyday life rather than grand battles or landscapes of noble sacrifice. Amidst a conflict that was upending antebellum social norms, these artists created realistic scenes of mundane events, known as genre paintings. While many of the paintings seem merely to show everyday incidents, Vanessa Meikle Schulman argues that artists connected the visuals to larger concerns.
With attention to how the war shaped new definitions of gender, race, and disability, Art during Wartime uncovers the complexity of these genre paintings. Schulman uses seven case studies of prominent and lesser-known artists who explored how the war instigated social change and shaped northern opinions about current events, including George Cochran Lambdin, Vincent Colyer, and Eastman Johnson. Utilizing detailed visual analysis and extensive historical research, Art during Wartime reframes our narrative of Civil War visual culture, placing genre painting in a central ideological role.
November 07, 2024