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.

VANESSA MEIKLE SHULMAN is associate professor of history and art history at George Mason University.

“Schulman 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.”—Jochen Wierich, author of Grand Themes: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting

“Few scholars of American art have tackled artistic representations of the Civil War, and Schulman is impressively thorough in surveying the field. Art during Wartime is an essential contribution to American art history.”—Patricia Johnston, editor of Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture