Paul Wood’s Absolution Under Fire: Remembering Gettysburg at the American Vatican1

If a picture can speak a thousand words, then one of the most voluminous accounts of Catholic service in the American Civil War appeared on canvas courtesy of a teenage painter and his professor patron. In September 1891, University of Notre Dame librarian and history professor James Edwards commissioned nineteen-year-old art student Paul Wood to portray former Notre Dame president Father William Corby’s general absolution of Union soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg. The young painter finished Absolution Under Fire in a matter of weeks, and the work went on display at Notre Dame’s Bishops’ Memorial Hall. Dubbed the “American Vatican” by one writer, the Hall and its related archives preserved Edwards’s ever-growing collection of Catholic artifacts, manuscripts, portraits, and relics. Absolution Under Fire, now housed at Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art, continues to attract visitors drawn by its ability to evoke the humanity and horror of combat. The image has been reproduced for diverse audiences, appearing in Catholic school history textbooks as well as National Park Service battlefield signage.² However, the painting’s timeless themes obscure the personal motivations and cultural contexts that shaped its creation.

This essay recovers the history of Absolution Under Fire and analyzes the painting as an artifact from U.S. Catholicism’s late nineteenth-century search for a usable past. Confronted by Protestant suspicions of the church’s compatibility with republicanism, many Euro-American Catholics embraced “Columbianism,” praising Christopher Columbus as a model layman and emphasizing the Catholic origins of U.S. peace and prosperity. These figures looked to the past in order to inspire present virtue among the faithful and combat anti-Catholicism.³ Viewed in this light, Wood’s striking portrayal of the Gettysburg absolution advanced the ongoing cultural campaign to place Catholicism at the center of U.S. history.

This case study focuses on Paul Wood and James Edwards, integrating visual culture and memory studies into broader narratives of U.S. Catholic history.⁴ The essay first delves into Wood’s lifelong love of military art before discussing Edwards’s efforts to collect and display the historical record of U.S. Catholicism. The study then turns to the creation and artistic composition of Absolution Under Fire, examining how the teenage artist’s macabre views of the Civil War interacted with Columbian cultural contexts on canvas. The piece concludes by reflecting on both the painting’s critical reception and the tragically short career of its creator.

“A Youthful Genius” Comes to Notre Dame

Almost from birth, Paul Wood seemed destined for a career painting military scenes. His father recalled one doctor’s phrenological explanation for the boy’s artistic prowess, citing “the peculiar conformation of the child’s head,” while less pseudoscientific evidence of his talents came in the form of early pencil sketches.⁵ Born in 1872 in Elgin, Illinois, Wood grew up hearing war stories from his father, a Union Army of the Potomac veteran and devout convert to Catholicism.⁶ In 1883, at the age of eleven, the boy’s interest in battle scenes grew when Paul Philippoteaux’s 276 by 22 foot cylindrical panorama painting of the Battle of Gettysburg debuted in Chicago. The scale and scope of Philippoteaux’s cyclorama – which weighed 6 tons and took the French painter and his assistants over a year and a half to complete – awed the young self-taught artist. Wood repeatedly visited the painting’s specially-designed Chicago auditorium to sketch scenes depicting “Pickett’s Charge,” the ill-fated final Confederate attack at Gettysburg.⁷

Photo of individual panel of the Civil War cyclorama from Paul Philippoteaux’s The Battle of Gettysburg (1883)

Image courtesy of Wake Forest University © 2005 Wake Forest University

Within two years, Wood went from copying cycloramas to assisting in their creation. Growing public interest in, even nostalgia for, all things Civil War encouraged an investor to establish a cyclorama studio close to the Wood family residence.⁸ In 1885, after seeing evidence of the boy’s talents...