Witness to the Bloody Angle

While on a family visit to Philadelphia last month, I toured the nearby Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, PA, not expecting to encounter Civil War art. The museum featured a wonderful exhibit of early 20th Century illustrators including N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, and Norman Rockwell.

Leisurely strolling along a wall lined with beautiful but bucolic works, I was stunned when suddenly confronted with a huge painting by N.C. Wyeth entitled “The Bloody Angle.” With due respect to Künstler, Troiani, et al., this was the most powerful piece of combat art I have seen.

The violence of the scene just leapt at me, all the more so for the silence in the room broken only by soft murmurs of other patrons. It moved me particularly since I had recently been there on tour at the Spotsylvania battlefield as Chris Mackowski painted a masterful word picture of what happened there.

The label by the picture reads as follows:

N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945)
The Bloody Angle, 1912
Oil on Canvas
Gift of Charles S. Crompton, Jr. in memory of his wife, Milbrey Dean Crompton, 2014

Wyeth intended The Bloody Angle to evoke the general horror of war and specifically to depict a crucial part of the Battle of Spotsylvania, Virginia (1864) for Mary Johnston’s novel Cease Firing. Johnston’s text is powerful. “Then the storm broke,” she wrote, “and the angle became the spot on earth where, it is estimated, in all the history of the earth the musketry fire was the heaviest. It became The Bloody Angle.”

Wyeth compressed both blue and gray soldiers into the lower two thirds of the picture, with the figures in the chaos of battle rising to a compositional angle symbolizing an horrific apex in the history of the war and of the country. He admitted to Johnston that the composition was also constructed with Houghton Mifflin’s advertising department in mind, feeling it would make an effective design for an advertising poster.

Newell Convers Wyeth (October 22, 1882 – October 19, 1945), known as N. C., is remembered as one of America’s most well-known illustrators but was also a painter. He created more than 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books including Treasure Island (1912), Kidnapped (1913), Robin Hood (1917), The Last of the Mohicans (1919), and Robinson Crusoe (1920). He did work for prominent periodicals as well as posters, calendars, and advertisements for clients such as Lucky Strike, Cream of Wheat, and Coca-Cola.

Wyeth was a realist painter of the Brandywine School under Howard Pyle’s tutelage at a time when the camera and photography began to compete with his craft. As a child in Massachusetts, he absorbed rich oral histories of ancestors as prominent participants in the French and Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War, which became subject matter for his art. Wyeth’s mother was acquainted with literary giants Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He is the father of Andrew Wyeth and the grandfather of Jamie Wyeth, both also well-known American painters.

Although Wyeth’s illustrations brought fame and fortune, he loathed the commercialism and constraints of the medium. To him, illustration reflected only outward thought or imitation of feeling, whereas painting expressed inner feeling. His “Bloody Angle” painting certainly conveys feeling, more so in person than on a page or small screen.

Novelist Mary Johnston was a cousin of Joseph E. Johnston. Cease Firing (1912) features a Confederate artilleryman from Virginia in the Overland Campaign. The book is available online, including relatively inexpensive first editions with Wyeth’s illustrations.

If you are in the Philadelphia area, I highly recommend a visit to the Brandywine Museum of Art, and for our Revolutionary War compatriots, the nearby Brandywine battlefield.