Lived here at a time. And so this is really a relic of 19th century civil war boarding house culture once upon a time everybody lived in boarding houses here congressman senators, even vice presidents of the united states lived in group homes. So this house aside from its history of being the place where abraham lincoln died is an important part of antebellum civil and civil war washington dc history aside from this being the lincoln death house. This house is also great museum of immigrant culture in washington and boarding house life in washington dc. I ve been coming here for years making pilgrimages here. I started coming here in 1986 when i joined the reagan administration and i ve been coming here for years and very excited that this year for the $150th anniversary. There s going to be a big commemoration for abraham lincoln because in past years, i m usually here alone. No one comes to this house on the night of this assassination. No one comes to honor lincoln. I might find one
Civil war curator eleanor jones harvey gives a group of journalists a tour of the galleries and describes how the conflict transformed photography and art in ways that are not always obvious. This is part two of a twopart program. One of my favorites is an artist that oh, i would say next to none of you know much about and that s conrad wise chapman. Conrad is the radical confederate in the family. He is 21 years old when the war breaks out conrad grew up in italy. And he ends up coming back to the united states specifically to fight he is that rabbit about all of this the nine little oil sketches in the matching frames that you see here are all his works conrad wise chapman is at his heart a landscape painter and i think he and sanford gifford actually are kind of doppelgangers for each other if you look at gifford s pictures and you look at chapman s pictures, there are a lot of parallels in the way that they handle the skies and the emotion and the little teeny tiny figures and they
Bicentennial american art scholarship really took off like a rocket but one of the things that happened as a result of the bicentennial i think is that we tended to look at historical events as benchmarks along the way nodes of progress as this great country developed, but there wasn t a lot of analytical work done on the effect of some of those events and unless you were working on an artist like winslow homer who directly engages with the civil war in general the war occurs as an event in a number of these artists lives. It s sometimes shows up directly in works, but most of the time not and as a result, they re never really had been a deep study and understanding of what the war years did to american art in this country it it s a parallel that holds and doesn t hold but i couldn t help as i was. Using about how to put this exhibition together that in the wake of 9/11. Look at what one day did to us as a country. You have a before a during and an after and we know that nothing is ev
Bicentennial i think is that we tended to look at historical events as benchmarks along the way nodes of progress as this great country developed, but there wasn t a lot of analytical work done on the effect of some of those events and unless you were working on an artist like winslow homer who directly engages with the civil war in general the war occurs as an event in a number of these artists lives. It s sometimes shows up directly in works, but most of the time not and as a result, they re never really had been a deep study and understanding of what the war years did to american art in this country it it s a parallel that holds and doesn t hold but i couldn t help as i was. Using about how to put this exhibition together that in the wake of 9/11. Look at what one day did to us as a country. You have a before a during and an after and we know that nothing is ever quite the same. We don t travel the same way. We don t look at each other the same way. We don t respond to events quite
And american art. View a slideshow of images at americanart. Si. Edu. Up next we visit the smithsonian american art museum where an exhibit features paintings and photographs created during the civil war curator eleanor jones harvey gives a group of journalists a tour of the galleries and describes how the conflict transformed photography and art in ways that are not always obvious. This is part two of a twopart program. One of my favorites is an artist that oh, i would say next to none of you know much about and that s conrad wise chapman. Conrad is the radical confederate in the family. He is 21 years old when the war breaks out conrad grew up in italy. And he ends up coming back to the united states specifically to fight he is that rabbit about all of this the nine little oil sketches in the matching frames that you see here are all his works conrad wise chapman is at his heart a landscape painter and i think he and sanford gifford actually are kind of doppelgangers for each other i