Battlelines

Battlelines: Gettysburg displays many never-before-published drawings of the professional artists who saw the war as eye-witnesses -- the sketch artists known as Specials by publications of the time, such as Harper's Weekly. Almost nowhere among the vast array of photographs related to the Civil War is a picture of a battle. That's because, of course, photography at the time was limited to that which was stationary. Civil War sketch artists had no such limitation. They could move quickly, go to the scene of the action, draw and interpret of what they, and communicate that to their viewers. They provided an important and vital record of what happened on and off the battlefields of the conflict. Yet the work of these men -- about 30 in all -- has been largely ignored for the past century and a half. We are familiar with few of their names, and we rarely see their original work. This series, Battlelines, hopes to correct that. More importantly, we have produced this series with the hope of bringing the interested reader fresh insights into America's defining conflict.