Nast and Homer:
War and other subject matter
The other day I was scratching at an amiable website called Son of the South, which has a lot of interesting mementoes from the American Civil War, including many of the pages from the wartime issues of Harper’s Weekly, the older brother of Harper’s Bazaar, a generously illustrated broadsheet that billed itself as “A Journal of Civilization”, at six cents per copy.
The website has ample reading on all of the Confederate and Union generals, plus Civil War medicine, native Americans, slavery, the “Mexican War” and the founding of Texas. Two things struck me in particular, one being that Harper’s Weekly, based in remote New York City, found a lot of other things to take notice of besides the war going on further south, as the above picnic scene in Central Park from August 1864 suggests. A typical weekend gathering, evidently.
The other surprise was that, out on the battlefields (or at least close enough to hear the screams), Matthew Brady had the company of a couple of notable artists, Winslow Homer and Thomas Nast. Both appear to have been stuck in camp most of the time, though there are some compelling long views of sieges.
Hailing from Boston and self-taught, Homer (1836-1910) had by the time the war began already earned a national reputation as an illustrator and opened his own studio in New York to launch his career as a painter of natural scenery.
But it was only when he moved to France in 1867 that his genius blossomed among the impressionists, and in watercolour at that. He travelled around the continent before coming to rest in England in 1882, and over the next two years his boyhood fascination with the sea was rediscovered.
On his return to the US he settled in Prout’s Neck, Maine, and began painting the seascapes for which he is most famous. He died there at age 74.
Below is the engraving from a May 1862 edition of Harper’s based on Homer’s sketch of Confederate soldiers wielding lanterns near Yorktown.
Homer’s “The Undertow”
It was Harper’s Weekly that established the credentials of Thomas Nast (1840-1902), and it is, of course, Santa Claus that reminds us of him primarily. Nast created the modern image of Santa for Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” and also invented the US Republican and Democratic parties’ elephant and donkey symbols.
These and other illustrations earned him the title “Father of American Caricature”. So influential were his newspaper cartoons that both Lincoln and Grant gave the German-born Nast credit for their electoral victories.
Schooled in art with Theodore Kaufmann and at the Thomas Jefferson Bryant Gallery of “Christian art”, he worked for other illustrated periodicals, covering a championship boxing match in England and Garibaldi’s liberation of Sicily before returning home and joining Harper’s in 1862. The wartime sketches he made at the front, sometimes more allegorical than they were factual but always dramatically shadowed with cross-hatching, became mammoth wood engravings printed across two pages.
After the war Nast illustrated more than 100 books, and in 1867, 33 huge historical paintings he created went on tour, with narration, as “Nast’s Grand Caricaturama”. Then he took on the corruption at New York’s Tammany Hall and was instrumental in bringing down Boss Tweed, whose face he made so notorious that the politician was recognised and arrested in Spain after escaping jail and fleeing there.
An American public weary of war and politics, a shift toward commercialism at Harper’s, and the ebbing fire in Nast’s belly accompanied the decline in his work and his career. In 1892 he launched his own magazine, Nast’s Weekly, and when it soon expired he tried unsuccessfully to return to his first ambition, historical painting. In 1902 Teddy Roosevelt made him consul-general to Ecuador, where he promptly died of yellow fever, age 62.
I was unable to discover whether the Harper’s illustration of Lincoln’s assassination was Nast’s work, but the image below it is his — Columbia weeps over the president’s coffin as a Union soldier and sailor share the grief.
