ABSTRACT
In 1866, the state of Pennsylvania commissioned Peter F. Rothermel (1812-1895), a well-regarded American portraitist and history painter, to complete a depiction of the infamous Civil War Battle of Gettysburg. The state paid the impressive sum of twenty thousand dollars for this scene in 1870, and in 1872, remitted a fi nal payment of fi ve thousand dollars for four much smaller companion canvases portraying different episodes from the three-day battle. 2 The Battle of Gettysburg – Pickett’s Charge (see frontispiece), the largest of the fi ve, was a monumental undertaking that certainly warranted the four years it took to complete. The colossal canvas is nearly seventeen feet by thirty-two feet and is today housed in The State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg. It is the largest single panel painting created by an American in the nineteenth century, but despite its monumentality and relevance to such an important event, the work has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. 3 Several discussions characterize the canvas as unsuccessful, a poorly executed painting that received mostly negative reviews by contemporary writers. Although it does exhibit some compositional inconsistencies, the unfavorable reactions refl ect more of a concern for its subject matter than for its technical fl aws, and it did receive several laudatory reviews after it was unveiled. In fact, this image was not the failure that some scholarship would lead us to believe. Rather, Rothermel’s ability – and intention – to show a unifi ed country within a depiction of a serious confl ict between Union and Confederate soldiers resounded in an overwhelmingly positive manner with most contemporary viewers. Our modern memory of this work has been clouded by a select few derogatory remarks and a subsequent decline in the twentieth century of the reputation of history painting generally. Indeed, The Battle of Gettysburg – Pickett’s Charge played a major role
in the postwar effort at memorializing a confl ict fought between Americans who were, in Rothermel’s time, striving to become unifi ed fellow citizens again.
