The Capitol Dome

great." 29 During a period of increasing national discord, political instability, and finally, civil war and reconstruc- tion, publicly visible images such as The Battle of Lake Erie and Washington Crossing the Delaware—made available to a wider audience through tours, prints, folk art, and other formats—reminded viewers of past leaders who had steered the ship, won the battle, secured the state, and in the troubled present, offered instructive if idealized lessons from the nation's past. Although it was not placed in the east staircase of the Senate wing until 1873, The Battle of Lake Erie was commis- sioned in 1865. Like other works of art in the Capitol, it rep- resents an official narrative of American history and politics and so presents a telling contrast to other visual imagery of the period. The American Civil War was the first to be recorded through the new medium of photography, and images like those produced under the auspices of the Matthew Brady stu- dio—which were widely circulated in a variety of mediums— revealed the true face of war to a civilian population for the first time, as seen in images such as Field at Antietam (1862) and Harvest of Death, Gettysburg (1863) (fig. 11). Referring to "The Dead of Antietam" photographs exhibited at Brady's New York gallery, a reporter for the New York Times noted that "If Mr. Brady has not brought the bodies of the dead and laid them at our doors... he has done something very like it." 30 The war also changed the tone and subject matter of American history painting, as its "unofficial" practitioners, such as Winslow Homer, shifted attention from the "great men and heroic events" narratives of the past to a less idealized and more egalitarian view that privileged the soldier's experience of war over that of the general, portrayed its effects and out- comes realistically, and advanced new perspectives on Ameri- can history and its visual representation (fig. 12). If official works commissioned for the Capitol in the Civil War period—Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, Apotheosis of Washington, and The Battle of Lake Erie— could not erase the images of America captured in Brady's photographs or Homer's paintings, perhaps they could, at least Fig. 11. A Harvest of Death, Gettyburg, Pennsylvania, taken by Timothy Sullivan in 1863 and published by Alexander Gardner in 1866, is one of the most famous images of the deadly aftermath of battle. Although Civil War photographers would often physically rearrange scenes for maximum effect, the images they captured effectively convey danger, horror, and other aspects of waging war. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, GILMAN COLLECTION, MUSEUM PURCHASE, 2005, WWW.METMUSEUM.ORG 21 THE CAPITOL DOME

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