Images from the Storm : 300 Civil War Images by the Author of Eye of the Storm

by Jr., Charles F. Bryan; Robert Sneden; James C. Kelly; Nelson D. Lankford

• ISBN13: 9780743223607
• ISBN10: 0743223608
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-09-25
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

The Civil War legacy of Robert Knox Sneden is an unparalleled treasure trove of words and pictures. The publication of the bestsellingEye of the Stormin the fall of 2000 first brought his memoir to light, accompanied by a sample of his artwork. In all, however, he crafted some 900 watercolors and sketches. Now, with the 300 watercolors, sketches, maps, and diagrams inImages from the Storm,his artistic legacy can be appreciated on its own terms -- an achievement equal in magnitude to his writings, and unsurpassed by any other Civil War soldier-artist.Images from the Stormpresents the best of Sneden's art throughout his odyssey of combat, capture, imprisonment, and deliverance, a pictorial record of the war that puts the viewer in the shoes of a Union soldier as nothing else can.Sneden aimed for vivid detail and documentary accuracy in his maps, landscapes, battles, and scenes of camp life. He sketched the camps and surroundings of the Union army, the siege of Yorktown, the battle of Williamsburg, the approach of the army to within sight of the church spires of Richmond, and the tumultuous fighting retreat of the Seven Days' battles as the Union army shrank before a relentless Confederate offensive. He drew dozens of maps and sketched daily life around Washington, D.C., before his capture in autumn 1863.For the next thirteen months, Sneden was a prisoner of the Confederacy. In a drafty tobacco warehouse in Richmond, he sketched prison life and Confederate scenes before being packed with others aboard cattle cars for a jolting train ride south. In a remote corner of rural Georgia, he survived the outdoor prison at Andersonville and drew some of his most astonishing images of camp life and its suffering. When Andersonville was evacuated, he continued to make secret pencil sketches of Confederate prisons in Savannah and Millen, Georgia, and in Florence and Charleston, South Carolina.Finally freed in a massive prisoner exchange in Charleston harbor, he returned home to New York at Christmas 1864. He made little use of his architectural training thereafter, but devoted himself to compiling his memoir of the war and converting his pencil sketches into watercolors. A solitary man who never married, Sneden died at an old soldiers' home in Bath, New York, in 1918. His watercolors and his story were forgotten for nearly a century. Images from the Storm reproduces the best of Sneden's art in sharp colors, so we can appreciate fully the mastery of a miniaturist who saw it all, and sketched whenever and wherever he could.

Author Biography

Charles F. Bryan, Jr. is Director and CEO of the Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Tennessee and has written on the Civil War in East Tennessee and the Peninsula Campaign. He is President-Elect of the American Association for State and Local History James C. Kelly is Assistant Director for Museums at the Virginia Historical Society. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University and has served as National Chairman of the Curators' Committee of the American Association of Museums Nelson D. Lankford is Assistant Director for Publications and Education at the Virginia Historical Society and edits its quarterly journal, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. He holds a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Odyssey of Private Robert Knox Sneden	p. xviii
Chronology	p. xix
Learning to Soldier	p. 1
On to Richmond!	p. 27
The Good Life	p. 133
Captured	p. 167
After the War	p. 241
Editorial Method	p. 253
Acknowledgments	p. 255
Index	p. 257
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction

The Civil War art of Robert K. Sneden, which lay dormant for over a century, has only recently become known through two collections. Last year in his memoir,Eye of the Storm,80 images were published; at the same time an exhibition of some 100 images began traveling the country on a yearlong journey. Yet the entire collection of surviving Sneden materials -- not only watercolors but also landscape sketches, engravings, and maps, numbering nearly 1,000 images -- has until now been seen only by a handful of scholars. Taken together, it is a magnificent opus; as one reviewer of the memoir put it, Sneden's is "a one-of-a-kind pictorial record history" of the War between the States. It is the largest extant collection of Civil War art. There is no exaggeration in saying that it is also one of the best collections of soldier art about war ever found.

Images from the Stormoffers more than 300 of Sneden's creations, a historical panorama portrayed by an accomplished northern draftsman. Many of these images are of scenes that were captured by no other artist or photographer. Sneden's maps, drawn in many cases from his own firsthand observations, are magnificently detailed and decorated. His watercolors drew on his experiences in Washington, in the Peninsula and Second Bull Run campaigns in Virginia, and finally in prisons at Richmond and Andersonville -- and in each of those places he sketched almost daily. After the war he spent years painstakingly coloring and polishing his sketches, and also painting imitations of scenes viewed only at second hand, including Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. His eye for detail was clinically accurate, his ability to pack details into miniaturized sketches astonishing.

Some three dozen of Sneden's sketches were used in his time as the basis of engravings reproduced here. Most, however, he quietly and obsessively created for his own mysterious purposes -- he may have intended publication, but we cannot know for sure. A few of Sneden's paintings measure as large as six by ten inches, but most are smaller, and are shown here with magnification. The total number were originally divided about equally between his illustrated memoir and his larger-format scrapbooks.

---

Excerpted from Images from the Storm: 300 Civil War Images by the Author of Eye of the Storm by Charles F. Bryan, James C. Kelly, Robert Knox Sneden
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.