Alfred R. Waud: Civil War Artist, and: Echo of a Distant Drum: Winslow Homer and the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS181 Alfred R. Waud: Civil War Artist. By Frederick E. Ray. (New York: Viking Press, 1974. Pp. 192, 141 Plates. $16.95.) Echo of a Distant Drum: Winslow Homer and the Civil War. By Julian Grossman. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1974. Pp. 204, 202 Plates. $25.00.) The American Civil War created an enormous demand for news and the northern press enthusiastically (if not always accurately) reported it, dispatching some five hundred correspondents to the front during the conflict. The illustrated weeklies, such as Harper's and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, with their large wood engravings of "battles, sieges, bombardments, stormings, and other scenes incidental to war," were especially popular, both on the home front and among the troops. Because "wet plate" photography was inadequate for the purpose of recording fast-moving armies and the half-tone reproductive process had not yet been perfected, Harper's and Leslie's assigned "special artists" to send home sketches of the battles and, during the lulls, drawings of life in camp, which were then translated by shop craftsmen into the brittle linear syntax of the wood engraving. Winslow Homer and Alfred R. Waud (pronounced Wode) worked for Harper's and were assigned to the Army of the Potomac. Homer's name is better known because he went on after the war to become one of the two or three truly great American painters of the nineteenth century, but an examination of Waud's work in Frederick E. Ray's handsome and well-written book suggests that Waud's accomplishments were in many ways equal to those of Homer and that in sheer productivity and tenacity, he was a better war correspondent than his more famous colleague. While Homer made only two visits to the Virginia front, once during the Peninsular Campaign and again during the battle of the Wilderness and then worked up his sketches into finished drawings in his New York studio, Waud traveled and lived with the Army of the Potomac from Bull Run to Appomattox and made all his drawings, often inscribed with detailed directions to the engravers, in the field. Ray, art director of Civil War Times Illustrated, divides his study of Waud into two parts: the first section is a scholarly account of Waud's pre-Civil War background and his work as a "special artist" from 1861 to 1865; the second reproduces about one hundred of Waud's drawings from the Library of Congress. The plates amply demonstrate Waud's amazing skill for making pictorial sense out of the confusion of battle. While he occasionally depended on stock poses for some of his figures and employed conventional solutions for his compositions, these seldom detract from the immediacy and documentary realism of the drawings. Waud's abilities as an artist are seen at their best in Building a Pontoon Bridge Under Fire at 182CIVIL WAR HISTORY Fredericksburg, December 11, 1862 in which soldiers of the 50th Engineers present inviting targets for the Rebel riflemen firing from the city across the river, the smoke from their weapons described by Waud in bright patches of Chinese white. In another drawing, Citizen Volunteers Assisting the Wounded on the Field of Antietam , September 18, 1862, Waud's devotion to pictorial realism proved to be unacceptable to his employers: a brutally accurate portrayal of an amputation in Waud's picture was redrawn by the Harper's engravers so that the folks at home wouldn't have to see a bloody stump. While Ray provides a thorough and interesting account of Waud's wartime work, Julian Grossman includes only a short introduction and accompanying notes to the beautifully reproduced plates in his book on Homer, which is, frankly, a coffee-table groaner, large in format and price, and not very well written or valuable as a contribution to our understanding of that complex man. Grossman brings together the Harper's Weekly pictures based on Homer's drawings (arranged chronologically), the original drawings, and Homer's Civil War paintings. Homer's war pictures are at their best when they deal with human feelings: homesickness, boredom, or the rather manic campfire revelry that Harper's featured so often. An artist to the...