Battlefield of New Hope Church, Georgia, No. 2

1866

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Dominant colour

Battlefield of New Hope Church, Georgia, No. 2 is a 1866 by George N. Barnard, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: George N. Barnard
When & what style?: 1866 · Impressionism
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

This painting shows a wide battlefield with smoke, broken fences, and scattered debris. It’s a photograph made huge—over four feet tall—so every detail pops off the page. Barnard took it in 1865 after a fight near New Hope Church where thousands died. The odd thing? In the 1860s, photos this big were brand-new. Most people only saw tiny prints tucked inside albums. But this one was meant to shock viewers with its size and ruin. Look up George N. Barnard (American, 1819–1902) for more Civil War photos like it.

The story of this work

Overview

From the medium’s beginnings in the 1830s through the 1880s, most photographs were intimately scaled objects meant for the hand, the album, and the home. As the medium began being used to document landscapes and monuments in the 1850s, larger scale processes arose such as the glass-plate negative. The mammoth print truly seemed gargantuan in the 1860s. For much of the 20th century, the 8-x-10-inch gelatin silver print was the norm for photojournalism; these prints were destined for reproduction in books and magazines around the same scale.

Read the full account in the museum source.