This drawing is a study for the painting The Letter Home, 1867, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The nurse is a portrait of Mrs. May, Johnson's sister and wife of Rev. Joseph May of Philadelphia. In a letter from Eastman's wife, Elizabeth Johnson, she suggests that "Camp Hospital at Gettysburg" is the original title. Set in the original wooden frame and bearing medals from the American Sanitary Commission, this work was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1968 under the title The Field Hospital.

In 1867, Henry T. Tuckerman had fine words of praise for Eastman Johnson's oil painting The Field Hospital (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, figure 1).¹ Tuckerman, then the dean of America's art writers, wrote at length in his Book of the Artists:

More pathetic [than The Drummer Boy], but equally true to life and nature, is another illustration of the War for the Union: In the foreground of the picture, under the cool shadow of the trees, lies upon a camp-cot a young soldier. He appears to be convalescent, and his face is turned toward a young woman, who is seated by his side, writing a letter at his dictation. In the distance are hospital tents, and a guard pacing his beat in the golden sunshine. "This is a simple yet touching story," says a critic, "which recalls the loving work so often done by noble women in the camp and in the hospital, and it is told with all that eloquence of color and perfection of design which has made his artist the Edward Frere of our country. One of his happiest conceits is seen in the picture, where the wounded soldier, in an absent, unconscious way, has taken in his hand a sprig from the apple-tree branches which sweep his pillow. It reminds him perhaps of that quiet farm-house away up among the hills or valleys of the North, of sisters, of mother, of home. The picture describes the sunnier side of the soldier's life, but it may be the one we most love to remember.²

Johnson's painting and his most identical, finished drawing (The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, figure 2) form the subjects of this present essay. The painting received enthusiastic attention from newspaper reviewers when exhibited at the 1868 annual spring show of the National Academy of Design. But the drawing had an even more extensive audience through the reproductive engraving issued in 1870 by L. Prang and Company, a Boston publisher of very popular chromolithographs.³According to the artist's widow, Johnson made such finished drawings as records of his more ambitious paintings. Writing to Mrs. E. W. Blatchford of Chicago on 27 October 1909, Mrs. Johnson described her husband's methods and specifically referred to The Field Hospital, a drawing of which Mrs. Blatchford then owned.

After he had painted a big genre painting & it had met with the usual success of all his pictures then he would make a crayon of it. I have cranberry picture complete in crayon also his Sugaring Off and it seems there was the painting of the Field Hospital of Gettysburg and it was given to Dr. Bellows. . . I have an engraving of the drawing.⁴

Although her wording is unclear, Mrs. Johnson seems to be informing Mrs. Blatchford that the latter's drawing, now in Minneapolis, resulted from Johnson's usual procedure. However, no other large drawings done by Johnson after his own later genre paintings have been located. Without the evidence, we cannot come to a firm judgment as to whether Johnson's subsequent "record" drawings were in fact as complete as the one now under discussion. In the meantime, other evidence reveals that Johnson did the drawing specifically as a commission, which accounts for its high degree of finish.⁵ It is appropriate, therefore, to analyze the qualities of execution visible in the drawing before turning to the relevant historical issues that generated both the subject and the commission.Drawings were the basis of Johnson's early artistic career. In the mid-1840s, his livelihood depended on his deft manipulation of charcoal and crayon for the portraits of Washington's political figures and of Cambridge's literary and intellectual elite. According to Johnson's early biographer, William Walton, Johnson's technique consisted of drawing a portrait in charcoal and then finishing it in hard crayons with the modeling being refined with the use of a stump.⁶ Although Johnson enlivened the surface of the paper with short, thin, black accents and touches of white highlights, he nevertheless perceived a face in terms of light and dark masses.Similarly, over twenty years later, he used the same basic technique when drawing The Field Hospital. He covered the paper with light charcoal strokes, then gave definition to the forms with denser black marks and skillful erasures. Moreover, by massing different densities of gray throughout the figures, foliage, trees, and other details, he achieved a convincing three dimensionality of form. Compared to the painting, which achieves much of its illusionism through color, the drawing is, and necessarily must be, crisper and more sculptural in order to accomplish such an impression of depth. In this comparison (between figures 1 and 2), we should particularly note the folds of the blanket covering the cot, the arrangement of the woman's skirt, and the silhouetting of the heads and pillow against the light-filled middle ground. No other draughtsman working in America during the 1860s quite matches the compositional skill and realism of Johnson when he did this drawing.Nevertheless, for all the merit the drawing has as drawing, its post-Civil War fame rested on its subject matter, the significance of which we can discover only by understanding both the "loving work so often done by noble women in the camp and in the hospital" and the role played by the United States Sanitary Commission, which fostered and encouraged women's involvement in this work. Indeed, any interpretation of Johnson's art must take into account its context within the social and cultural history of our country. Johnson consciously aimed at being relevant to his times, and he usually succeeded in choosing those themes that would stir popular sentiment. His reward came from the critics, who lavished higher praise on his than on any other genre painter of the 1860s, and this acclaim translated into better sales and frequent commissions.A brief sketch of his life is in order: Jonathon Eastman Johnson was born in Lovell, Maine, on 29 July 1824, the third of eight children of Mary Chandler Johnson and Philip Carrigan Johnson.⁷ Within a few years the family moved first to Fryeburg and then to the state capital, Augusta, where the elder Johnson held several governmental positions. Young Eastman showed an early aptitude for art and at sixteen was placed in a Boston lithography shop. By 1842, he was back in Augusta sketching relatives and his father's friends in the state legislature, and he even traveled to Portland for commissions.About 1844 or 1845, Johnson moved to Washington, D.C., in order to establish himself in the portrait business. He was permitted, perhaps due to his father's political connections, to use one of the U.S. Senate's committee rooms as a studio. There he drew many American notables including John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Dolley Madison, Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, and several Supreme Court judges. In the summer of 1846, Johnson moved to Boston where he did portrait drawings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, his family, and their circle of literary friends.By the summer of 1849, Johnson had decided to go to Europe with his friend George H. Hall to study. They settled in Dusseldorf where Johnson attended classes at the Royal Academy and came under the influence of the German-American painter Emanuel Leutze, the most popular artist among the Americans living in Dusseldorf. Before leaving Dusseldorf in the summer of 1851, Johnson made a small oil copy of Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware that was used by the engraver to reproduce Leutze's popular masterpiece.From Dusseldorf he went to the Netherlands and settled at The Hague where he studied the works of Rembrandt and other seventeenth-century Dutch masters. He stayed in The Hague for four years, developing a reputation as a portraitist, even being offered the position of court painter, according to one biographer. Convinced of the need for yet further study, he went to Paris in May 1855 where a number of his American friends had gravitated to the studio of Thomas Couture. But in October 1855 following news of his mother's death, he cut short his stay and returned to America.By the late 1850s, Johnson had firmly established his American reputation. He first painted in and around Washington, D.C., where his family lived; then visited Superior, Wisconsin, the home of one sister; and stayed several months in Cincinnati before finally settling in New York City by April 1858. Once established, he worked on his major painting to date, Negro Life at the South, now titled Life in the South (The New York Historical Society). It became the star attraction of the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design held in the spring of 1859 and brought Johnson immediate fame. He was elected an associate of the academy and the following year was promoted to full academician. And by 1862, he had been invited to join the prestigious Century Club, further guaranteeing social contact with some of the country's most important art patrons.With the outbreak of the Civil War, Johnson naturally turned his attention to the conflict for artistic inspiration. He had already heeded what seemed to be a national mandate for specifically "American" subject matter. After his return from Europe, his artistic energies focused on sketching and painting George Washington's homestead at Mount Vernon; blacks in Washington, D.C.; the Chippewa Indians near Lake Superior; and farmers in New England. Now during 1862 and 1863, he followed the Union troops in hopes of finding suitable subjects. In the spring of 1862, he was present at a battle near Bull Run, for he recorded on a label affixed to the reverse of one of three versions of A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves the following inscription: "A veritable incident/in the Civil War seen by/myself at Centerville/on this morning of/McClellan's advance towards Manasses March 23, 1862/Eastman Johnson.⁸Johnson also witnessed the Battle of Antietam on 17 September 1862 where he found the subject for The Wounded Drummer Boy, of which he made several renditions between 1864 and 1871 (see figure 3). And he made yet a third trip according to Colonel Hiram Hayes:

Just following the Battle of Gettysburg [July 1-2, 1863] our army made a detour through Maryland to intercept General Lee's crossing of the Potomac into Virginia. In this movement Eastman fell into my line of march with some army trains which I commanded, and we campaigned together for a week or more.⁹

It was from this experience, according to his widow in the letter quoted to his widow in the letter quoted above, that Johnson was later to paint The Field Hospital.Paintings of the Civil War's home front activities became a subgenre of the time, and Johnson explored several themes. His News from the Front of 1861 depicts an interior scene with an injured soldier visiting a young girl and her mother, who limply holds a letter the soldier has just delivered.¹⁰ Writing to Father, 1863 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, figure 4), represents a young boy dressed in a cut-down Union soldier's uniform writing a letter. Such communication between home and the battle front took on a moral urgency at the time. Historian Ethel Alice Hurn, reflecting on the war in 1911, commented:

If the home connection was once lost or broken the solider was apt to be set adrift on a sea of loneliness and temptation. When it is taken into consideration that many of our volunteers were mere boys, the value of the home connection is even more apparent.The soldier's craving for news from home was more positive than even his desire to end the cruel war.¹¹

Hurn also quoted several soldiers testifying to the importance of letters, as did Mary A. Livermore in her reminiscences My Story of the War: A Woman's Narrative of Four Years Personal Experience as Nurse in the Civil War, which was published in 1889.¹²Another Johnson subject relevant to the home effort was the making of Union clothing. As early as 1861, Johnson painted Knitting for the Soldiers (The New York Public Library) that represents a young girl standing in a rustic interior as she focuses on her knitting. Women Sewing-Work for the Fair of 1862 shows an older girl seated in a middle-class room concentrating on her needlework.¹³ This later painting was probably the same Working for the Fair included in the art exhibition of the Metropolitan Fair held in aid of the United States Sanitary Commission in April 1864.The U.S. Sanitary Commission has been described by historian George M. Fredrickson as "the largest, most powerful, and most highly organized philanthropic activity that had ever been seen in America"¹⁴ to that date. The commission was an outgrowth of the Women's Central Association of Relief for the Sick and Wounded of the Army, which was founded in April 1861 in New York City. The women asked a group of men, notably the Reverend Henry W. Bellow, a Unitarian minister, to help them set up a commission that could move supplies to the front lines. Bellows, along with three prominent New York physicians, Wolcott Gibbs, Cornelius R. Agnes, and William Van Buren, traveled to Washington.¹⁵ The army was finally pressured into yielding to the demands of these influential professionals, whose motives—like those of the army itself—were to bring discipline and efficiency to the administration of war relief.¹⁶ By June 1861, the secretary of war issued an order making Bellows, Van Buren, Gibbs, and five other men "A Commission of Inquiry and Advice in respect to the Sanitary interests of the United States forces."¹⁷ By the following spring, the U.S. Sanitary Commission was a secure, semi-official organization involved with coordinating relief and sanitary inspections of the army's camps; providing additional nurses, hospitals, and ambulances to supplement the army's own efforts in this regard; gathering statistics of the dead and wounded;¹⁸ and, of course, raising funds so that all of these activities could take place.Like the commission itself, the large fairs that it sponsored to raise money were run by the business, professional, and social elite of the North. In late October 1863, the first fair, later called the North-Western Sanitary Fair, opened in Chicago and was followed by fairs in Boston, Cincinnati, Brooklyn, New York City, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. The fairs, which ran about three weeks, sold produce, goods, and war trophies and exhibited art works.¹⁹Featured in New York's Metropolitan Fair of 1864 were America's most celebrated mid-century paintings, including Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Frederick Church's Niagara (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) and The Heart of the Andes (Metropolitan Museum of Art), Albert Bierstadt's The Rocky Mountains (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Daniel Huntington's Mercy's Dream (Corcoran Gallery of Art). Johnson contributed The Post Boy and Working for the Fair, then owned by Marshall O. Roberts and Sheppard Gandy, respectively. A second exhibition of works for sale for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission included in Johnson's The Young Sweep.Of the 153 paintings in the main exhibition, Johnson's Working for the Fair was perhaps the only work referring to contemporary events—either the war or home front activities. And of the 207 works for sale, only nine have titles clearly suggestive of Civil War themes.²⁰ Of the others, Leutze's paintings Florence Nightingale at Scutari (location unknown), which depicted the English nurse and heroine of the Crimean war, was probably significant for Johnson's The Field Hospital. However, as was characteristic of the times and of every subsequent war period, artists as a whole did not feel compelled to comment on the contemporary crisis. Thus, Johnson, along with Winslow Homer, George Lambdin, and Edwin Forbes, was among the few who depicted such topics during the 1860s.The history of the sanitary fairs and their importance to art history have not yet been analyzed but for mid-century patronage in New York City, there is no doubt that the Metropolitan Fair was an important moment, because it created an occasion when both artists and socially prominent and wealthy patrons could join together for a cause that did not rest on the monetary relationship of patron to artist. Of course, there is no denying that such associations did help artists professionally. Johnson, for instance, was commissioned by William T. Blodgett, a member of the Committee on Fine Arts, to paint an informal family portrait. Even if they had a previous friendship, it was certainly strengthened by their work together on the fair.²¹While a number of women worked for the fairs in the cities, many went out into the field as organizers and nurses.²² Sixtyish Dorothea Dix, a crusader for the mentally ill, was appointed in June 1861 to recruit and supervise women for the army's nursing program. Preferring spinsters, aged 30 to 45, she declared that: "All nurses are also required to be plain looking women."²³ Other nurses also became legendary and included Mother Bickerdyke and Clara Barton, who worked independently of the Sanitary Commission.Women's involvement with the war effort was a matter of news, and illustrations of such activities appeared regularly. Harper's Weekly of 6 September 1862 printed a large, fold-out wood engraving entitled Our Women and the War (figure 5). In a paragraph commenting on it, the editors wrote:

In one corner will be seen that exquisite type of angelic womanhood, the Sister of Charity, watching at the bedside of a dying soldier, ever ready to relieve his wants and minister to his desires. On the other side a lady-nurse is writing, at the dictation of a poor wounded fellow, a letter to the friends far away, which shall relieve their terrible anxiety. Above, a group of young ladies are busily engaged, with needle and sewing-machine, in making clothing for the troops, and especially those comfortable garments which even our prodigal Government does not deem it necessary to supply. One can almost see the fairy fingers fly along the work. Last of all, honest Biddy, who has probably got a lover or a husband or a brother at the war, is doing her part in helping the soldiers by washing for them. The moral of the picture is sufficiently obvious; there is no woman who can not in some way do something to help the army.²⁷

Soon accounts written by the nurses themselves began appearing in the press. Louisa May Alcott, a third-generation Concord abolitionist, enthusiastically went off to Washington in December 1862 where she was assigned to a hospital receiving the wounded from the Battle of Fredericksburg. She worked vigorously for a month before coming down with typhoid fever. Taken back home by her father, Bronson Alcott, she revised the letters she had written to her family for publication in the anti-slavery paper Commonwealth. These "sketches" appeared in late May and June 1863 and were so successful that she arranged for their circulation in book form under the title Hospital Sketches.²⁵ Moreover, biographical sketches of such women were issued as well. Frank Moore in his 1866 Women of the War: Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice summed up what must have been the popular sentiment among the Northern middle class regarding these women:

We may safely say that there is scarcely a loyal woman in the North who did not do something in aid of the cause—who did not contribute, of time, or labor, or money, to the comfort of our soldiers and the success of our arms. No town was too remote from the scene of war to have its society of relief; and while the women sewed and knit, and made delicacies for the sick, and gathered stores, little girls, scarce old enough to know what charitable labor meant, went from house to house, collecting small sums of money—the fruitful energy of all keeping the storehouses and treasury of the Sanitary Commission full, and pouring a steady stream of beneficence down to our troops in the field.These are they who followed their husbands and brothers to the field of battle and to rebel prisons; who went down to the very edge of the fight, to rescue the wounded and cheer and comfort the dying with gentle ministrations; who labored in field and city hospitals. . . who were angels of mercy in a thousand terrible situations.²⁷

Thus in 1867, when sentiment for the contribution of women was still running high, Johnson painted The Field Hospital.Early in that year Johnson had exhibited a post-war interior scene The Pension Claim Agent (The Fine Arts Museums of Sand Francisco, figure 6) at the National Academy's spring 1867 exhibition. In his review, the New York Times' critic found Johnson's painting "by far the most important contribution" in an otherwise lackluster exhibition and Johnson "the most progressive of American artists, every year exhibiting a decided advance in the character and quality of his work."²⁸When Johnson sent The Field Hospital to the academy's exhibition the following year, 1868, it, too, was highly praised as a "meritorious" work by the Times:

The subject is simple and quickly conveyed. A young soldier lays [sic] wounded on a hospital couch beneath a pleasant shade of grove trees. By his side and in the act of transcribing a letter from his dictation is a young lady. The background is filled up with huts and sentinels. The story is very tender and touching and is told with much frankness. Mr. Johnson avoids the common error of harrowing up the feelings by mere ghastliness. The good-looking lad, with his honest sun-burnt face and still expression, excites the sympathy of the beholder from the sheer reality of his misfortune.²⁹

To this reviewer, a "simple" subject meant an ordinary soldier. He thereby reveals his mid-nineteenth-century democratic values that held in the simple and ordinary could be found ideas and concepts of universal and "American" significance.According to the above-cited letter of Johnson's widow, the site for her husband's painting was the field hospital near Gettysburg, and the woman who posed for the nurse was his younger sister Harriet Johnson May, married to the Unitarian minister, the Reverend Joseph May. Appropriately attired in somber clothing, she might have been a suitable recruit according to Dorothea Dix's standards, except for her lack of plainness. While Harriet was posing for Johnson in his studio, it is tempting to speculate that they might have discussed Hospital Sketches in which Alcott, Harriet's husband's cousin,³⁰ gave an amusing account of her experience with letter writing:

The letters dictated to me, and revised by me, that afternoon, would have made an excellent chapter for some future history of war; for, like that which Thackeray's "Ensign Spooney" wrote his mother just before Waterloo, they were "full of affection, pluck, and bad spelling"; nearly all giving lively accounts of the battle, and ending with somewhat sudden plunge from patriotism to provender, desiring "Marm," "Mary Ann," or "Aunt Peters," to send along some pies, pickles, sweet stuff, and apples, "to yourn in haste," Joe, Sam, or Ned, as the case might be.³¹

Johnson's work, however, has none of the levity of Alcott's account, nor does it have the wryness of Winslow Homer's image of the same subject.Homer's lithograph The Letter for Home (figure 7) was included in his portfolio Campaing Sketches, published in 1863 by L. Prang. In the Homer lithograph, there is a sharp angularity and intensity to the figure and clothes of the woman taking dictation. The setting is a bleak, anonymous hospital ward with the ghostly figure of a crippled soldier in the background. In contrast, the Johnson painting has no such urgent and bitter intensity; instead, we have an image of hope, even of beatification. The box on which the young woman sits is marked "U. S. Sanitary Commission," and as their "angel of mercy" she will transport the soldier's thoughts back to his family. Meanwhile, the glowing sunlight of the background creates a pale yellow-green halo behind the injured soldier that is suggestive of both his patient saintliness and of the coming spring.³²When exhibited at the academy in 1868, the painting was listed as being in the collection of George H. Purser, a New York lawyer.³³ But in writing to Mrs. Blatchford in the letter already cited, Mrs. Johnson stated that the painting was a gift to Henry Bellows, the head of the Sanitary Commission. Since Mrs. Johnson did not marry her husband until 1869 and was writing in 1909, she could not be expected to know of the exact disposition of works done by him some forty years previously, but her statement does link Bellows with the provenance of either the painting or drawing. Another clue to the subsequent history of the two Johnson versions comes from F. A. Eastman who wrote an article on Blatchford for the Chicago Chronicle dated 14 April 1903. According to Eastman, the work owned by Blatchford "was executed in pursuance of a commission given to the artist by the lady manager of the sanitary fair that was held in New York. . . The New York sanitary fair was the richer for it by $5,000."³⁴From these two sources, the widow and the reporter, we might speculate that it was the drawing—not the painting—that was give to Dr. Bellows in 1867 or shortly thereafter, when he was both concluding the affairs of the Sanitary Commission and also serving as president of the recently organized American Association for the Relief of Misery of Battle Fields [sic]. Clearly, it was also the drawing—not the painting—that was sent to Prang's engravers, because details in the engraving exactly follow those of the drawing, including the omission of the lettering "U.S. Sanitary Commission" from the box on which the woman sits.The Chicago reporter states that Blatchford's work was a commission benefiting the Metropolitan Fair by $5,000. Previously, in the promotional journal Prang's Chromo of Christmas 1870, Prang quoted the Boston Women's Journal, which also had asserted the same figure:

Eastman Johnson, the greatest of American genre painters, among other works illustrative of the war, executed a picture commemorative of the services of our women as hospital nurses during the rebellion. It was much admired at the time, and was purchased by Prang, who has had it engraved at an expense of five thousand dollars.³⁵

By piecing together evidence at hand, we can suggest the following explanation: Johnson gave Bellows the drawing for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission. Louis Prang then offered the commission $5,000 for it—a considerable sum. However, by such a gesture Prang was giving to a patriotic cause. He also would have had in mind making money back through the sale of the print. Prang is known to have purchased all of the art works he reproduced and to have later sold them at auction. Since there were auctions of his collection in 1870 and 1876, E. W. Blatchford might have bought the drawing at auction if he did not buy it directly from Prang himself.³⁶ In any event, the drawing entered the collection of E. W. Blatchford, a man active in U.S. Sanitary Commission affairs as the Chicago branch's corresponding secretary and assistant treasurer.³⁷When the drawing was purchased by The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1974, it arrived in a period frame (figure 8) that incorporated bronze medallions from the Great Central Fair held in Philadelphia in June 1864 and the second North-Western Sanitary Fair held in Chicago in 1865.³⁸ The frame might have been designed by Peter B. Wight, the architect of Blatchford's Chicago home, for the floral designs incised into the corners of the oak frame are in style of Wight's other decorative details for the house into which the Blatchford's moved in 1876.³⁹ One suspects that Blatchford had his own suggestions, for the medallions thus mounted would have been constant reminders of his work for the U. S. Sanitary Commission, especially since the drawing does not have the inscription on the box that relates to commission activities.In the subsequent wars in which the United States has been involved, the Red Cross has carried on relief work similar to that practiced by the Sanitary Commission.⁴⁰ At least two Red Cross images perpetuate the legacy of Johnson's Field Hospital: Lewis Hine's dramatic photograph Man with Artificial Arm (figure 9)⁴¹ which was done following the end of World War I and emphasizes the role of technology in rehabilitation, and the cloying poster Now, More Than Ever-Your Red Cross Is at His Side (figue 10), which was done by an obscure illustrator named Whitman.⁴²But Johnson, with The Field Hospital, spoke for the Northern middle class of the 1860s with far greater assurance than was possible for either Hine or Whitman in their own eras. Tuckerman's 1867 assessment of Johnson typifies the critics' responses in that decade:

In all his works we find vital expression, sometimes naive, at others earnest, and invariably characteristic; trained in the technicalities of his art, keen in his observation, and natural in his feeling, we have a genre painter in Eastman Johnson who has elevated and widened its naturalistic scope and its national significance.⁴³

In the picture of The Field Hospital, we do indeed have a work of national significance. Although we assume the young man to be a Union soldier and certainly Johnson intended him to be so, Johnson's contemporaries would have known of the Sanitary Commission's efforts to help some 7,300 Confederate soldiers wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg and abandoned by their own retreating armies. That effort to aid the enemy became symbolic of what Northerners considered their own superior, humanitarian ethics. Charles Stille, a Sanitary Commissioner, who wrote the group's official history, was of the opinion that:

There is certainly nothing finer in its impulse, or more creditable to the civilization and humanity of the people of the North, than their willingness to share with their enemies the bounty which they had provided for their own suffering brethren.⁴⁴

Stille, writing in 1886, found it also important to emphasize that it was the North that wanted to save the Union—all of the Union, including the South. Tuckerman, too, called the conflict the "War for the Union."Explicit in Johnson's work is the caring role of the woman; the healing powers of sunlight, nature, and time; and the optimism of renewal. Implicit in Johnson's motif of letter writing is the re-bonding of a war-torn family, with a woman facilitating that family strengthening. Such a picture was needed in 1867—for the sake of the history of the United States Sanitary Commission, for the legend of the North, and for the recuperation of returning soldiers.⁴⁵What sort of image is The Field Hospital for the women who organized the fairs, went through the lines of battle, and nursed the soldiers? As historians such as Mary Elizabeth Masey have now persuaded us, "The Civil War compelled women to become more active, self-reliant, and resourceful, and thus ultimately contributed to their economic, social, and intellectual advancement."⁴⁶ But The Field Hospital did not represent this new self-reliance of women. And yet there was obviously a movement to acknowledge women's considerable and active valor in the war effort, because when Louis Prang published the engraving in 1870 it was titled Our Women Warriors. It is no coincidence that also that year Prang published the plate Representative Women, described as "portraits of seven ladies identified with the women's movement." Prang was a shrewd businessman and realized the potential market for prints that spoke of women's activism.But we search in vain, in the fine arts at any rate, for an image of a real woman warrior—for the image of a Clara Barton striding through a war-ravaged landscape with bundles of bandages under her arm. The collective consciousness of middle-class women in the women's movement and their male sympathizers may have insisted on verbal affirmation of active female heroism ("our women warriors"), but it was not making any similar demands on art nor insisting on a visual culture with progressive view.The role of art and visual culture in the transmission of social values, then or now, must not be underestimated. Johnson's picture embodied older values when it emphasized women's nurturing and caring role. This return to traditional values following a major war was repeated in our own post-World War II decade when newsreels and movies-often overtly, sometimes covertly-urged women to leave their war-time jobs and return to their homes and families.⁴⁷Patricia Hills in an associate professor of art history at Boston University specializing in nineteenth-and twentieth-century American painting. She has organized several major exhibitions for the Whitney Museum of American Art including: "Eastman Johnson" (1972); "The Painters' America: rural and Urban Life, 1810-1910" (1974); and "Turn-of-the-Century America: Paintings, Graphics, Photographs, 1890-1910" (1977); and was co-curator of "The Figurative Tradition and the Whitney Museum of American Art" (1980).Author's Note: I want to express my gratitude to the staff of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, who offered me the use of their facilities during 1982-83.Endnotes

1. Until August 1983, the Museum of Fine Arts called the work The Letter Home, a title it had had since it entered the collection as part of the M. and M. Karolik Collection in 1948. The museum's files do not reveal why the original name was changed, perhaps because of Homers' 1863 lithograph of the same subject. Throughout this essay I will use the titles under which Johnson first exhibited his paintings. The present locations, where known, are noted in parentheses.
2. Book of the Artists: American Artist Life Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists, Preceded by an Historical Account of the Rise & Progress of Art in America (New York: James F. Carr, 1967), pp. 468-69. [First published in 1867.] The French painter Edward Frere (1814-1888) was frequently compared to Johnson during the 1860s; residing at Ecouen, he attracted several Americans to that town including Henry Bacon and Frost Johnson, whose works are sometimes mistakenly attributed to Eastman Johnson himself.
3. I am grateful to both Bernard Riley of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress and Paul Swenson, assistant curator of prints of the Boston Public Library, for searching within their respective collections for information about this print. The Library of Congress owns an impression before lettering, measuring 21 5/8 by 26 inches plate (16 11/16 by 21 3/4 inches image size), which I closely examined in November 1983. The engravers for L. Prang were Frederick Halpin and B. V. Hunt; the print was titled Our Women Warriors. The major differences between the painting, on the one hand, and the print drawing, on the other, is that the painting contains the inscription "U.S. Sanitary Commission" on the box on which the young woman sits.
4. I want to thank Betty J. Blum, who is writing an article on the home of Eliphalet Wickes Blatchford (1826-1914), for bringing this letter to my attention, here quoted with the permission of the Newberry Library. Photocopies of the letter are in the files of The Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I am also grateful to Erica E. Hirshler for sending me other photocopies from the files of the Museum of Fine Arts.
5. Another example of a finished drawing is The Wounded Drummer Boy in the collection of The Century Association, New York.
6. William Walton, "Eastman Johnson, Painter," Scribner's Magazine 40 (September 1906), p. 265. I have previously discussed Johnson's early drawing style in "Gentle Portraits of the Longfellow Era: The Drawings of Samuel Worcester Rowse," Drawing vol. 2, no. 6 (March-April 1981), pp. 121-26.A stump is made of tightly rolled leather, felt, or paper, like a cigar. In the nineteenth century, balls of thread were used for the same purpose.
7. Information on Johnson's life can be found in Patricia Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson: The Sources and Development of His Style and Themes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), which incorporates the information published on Johnson in John I. H. Baur, Eastman Johnson, 1824-1906: An American Genre Painter (Brooklyn: Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1940).
8. See Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson, p. 80, note 5.
9. Quoted in Baur, Eastman Johnson, p. 19; see also Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson, pp. 81-82. Johnson also painted Civil War Scene (The Brooklyn Museum), a view of dusty and resigned soldiers assembling at the lines, but he site pictured cannot be determined.
10. Reproduced in Herman Warner Williams, Jr., The Civil War: The Artist's Record (Washington, D.C. and Boston: The Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, 1961), p. 79, where the owner is listed as Edward Eberstadt & Sons. This useful catalogue, with its many quotations from contemporary accounts, started me on my investigations of Civil War literature.
11. Ethel Alice Hurn, Wisconsin Women in The War between the States (Wisconsin History Commission, 1911), p. 92.
12. The full title is My Story of the War: A Woman's Narrative of Four Years Personal Experience as a Nurse in the Union Army, and in Relief Work at Home, in Hospitals, Camps, and at the Front During the War of the Rebellion with Anecdotes, Pathetic Incidents, and Thrilling Reminiscences Portraying the Lights and Shadows of Hospital Life and the Sanitary Service of the War (Hartford: A. D. Worthington and Co., 1889).
13. Reproduced in The Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts Bulletin, vol. 19, no. 2 (Winter 1948-49), p. 5.
14. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 98. I want to thank Professor Regina Morantz, University of Kansas, for bringing this study to my attention. Useful also for the history of the commission are Charles J. Stille, History of the United States Sanitary Commission, Being the General Reports of Its Work during the War of the Rebellion (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1868); Henry W. Bellows, The United States Sanitary Commission, reprinted from Johnson's Universal Encyclopedia for Private Distribution, a copy of which, marked "New York 187-?," is owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society; and William Quentin Maxwell, Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956).
15. Will Irwin, Earl Chapin May, and Joseph Hotchkiss, A History of the Union League Club of New York City (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1952), p. 2.
16. The thesis of Fredrickson's chapter, "The Sanitary Elite: The Organized Response to Suffering," is that the male commissioners had in mind efficiency and order before philanthropic humanitarianism. They wanted particularly to control the spontaneous philanthropy of the ladies.
17. Stille, History, p. 63.
18. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War, p. 99.
19. For New York's Metropolitan Fair, which opened April 14, 1864, the prominent Mrs. Hamilton Fish was president of the Ladies' Association and Major General John A. Dix was president of the Gentlemen's Association. The two committees, however, did not always work well together, for the women often made plans that the men then tried to overrule (see Maxwell, Lincoln's Fifth Wheel, p. 225). The Committee on the Fine Arts had an impressive roster with John F. Kensett as chairman and Mrs. Jonathan Sturges, the wife of the art patron, as cochair. Eastman Johnson was on the committee along with the artists Richard Morris Hunt, Thomas Hicks, William Haseltine, Emanuel Leutze, Worthington Whittredge, Daniel Huntington, Launt Thompson, and the photographer Mathew B. Brady. The art collectors on the committee included, besides Mrs. Sturges, Mr. and Mrs. William T. Blodgett, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph H. Choate, Mrs. William Osborn, Abraham M. Cozzens, Marshall O. Roberts, and the dealer M. Knoedler. The Metropolitan Fair was probably the most successful of all the fairs, netting almost $1,177,000, of which almost $74,000 was earned by the picture gallery. See the Catalogue of the Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Fair in Aid of the U.S. Sanitary Commission (New York: U.S. Sanitary Commission, 1864).For information on the individual fairs, see Unites States Sanitary Commission, History of the North-Western Soldiers' Fair Held in Chicago the Last Week of October and the First Week of November, 1863 (Chicago: Dunlop, Sewell & Spalding, 1864); and Charles J. Stille, Memorial of The Great Central Fair for the U.S. Sanitary Commission held in Philadelphia, June 1864 (Philadelphia: United States Sanitary Commission, 1864).
20. Information gleaned from the United States Sanitary Commission's 1864 Catalogue of the Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Fair.
21. See Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson, pp. 117-18, for a discussion of The Blodgett Family and pp. 75-78 for information about Johnson's involvement with art patrons in the Union League Club and plans for the formation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
22. See Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966); the notes to Bessie Z. Jones's "Introduction" to the reprint of Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); and my note 26. Useful also are the biographies of the individual women in Edward T. James et al., eds., Notable American Women: 1607-1950, A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
23. Quoted in Notable American Women, vol. 1, p. 488.
24. Harpers' Weekly, 6 September 1862, p. 570. Before the nurses under Dix arrived in the field, the Sisters of Charity provided much of the care for the wounded. A similar image with five vignettes was published in Harper's Weekly, 9 April 1864, at the time the Metropolitan Fair opened.
25. See Bessie Z. Jones's "Introduction" in Alcott, Hospital Sketches, pp. xl-xlii.
26. See Jones in Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. xlii, note 41, for a comprehensive listing of such accounts. There were also men in attendance at the hospitals, the most famous being Walt Whitman (see Fredrickson's The Inner Civil War for for references).
27. Frank Moore, Women of the War: Their Heroism and Self-Sacrifice (Hartford: S.S. Scranton & Co., 1866), pp. iv-v. See also L.P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan, Women's Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism and Patience (Philadelphia: Ziegler, McCurdy & Co., 1867) with biographical sketches of over fifty women.
28. The New York Times, 23 May 1867, p. 5. This work was also described at length by Russell Sturgis, Jr. for The Galaxy, vol. 4 (June 1867), pp. 230-315, which is quoted in Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson, p. 84. Johnson's painting Fiddling His Way, 1866, which depicts a newly freed slave playing his fiddle for his livelihood, was sent to Paris in 1867 to hang in the American section of the Universal Exposition and was, therefore, not in that year's exhibition. It, too, is an important document about the attitudes of many Northerners.
29. "Fine Arts: National Academy of Design," The New York Times, 14 May 1868, p. 5.
30. See Richard Sullivan Edes, A Genealogy of the Descendants of John May Who Came from England to Roxbury in America 1640(Boston: Franklin Press, 1878), pp. 22-23. Harriet's husband, Joseph May, was the son of the staunch abolitionist and Unitarian minister, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May. He was described by Bessie Z. Jones in Alcott, Hosptial Sketches, p. xi, as "the benefactor of the Alcott's" who "had been intimately associated with Garrison and the beginnings of the anti-slavery movement, had served briefly as general agent and secretary of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and had turned his house in Syracuse into a station on the Underground Railway." Johnson did at least two portraits of Dorothea Dix: a drawing belongs to the Fogg Art Museum, and an oil on academy board belonged to Kennedy Galleries, New York, in 1971.
31. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, pp. 38-39.
32. Another reference in fine arts painting to field hospitals is William Morris Hunt's Playing Field Hospital, 1865, which shows children in an interior playing with dolls and toy-covered wagons and has been reproduced in William H. Gerdts, The Art of Healing: Medicine and Science in American Art (Birmingham Museum of Art, 1981), p. 49.
33. Listed in New York City Directory, 1867-68, as a "lawyer" with offices on Nasau Street. Otherwise, I have not come across his name as either a collector or as someone actively involved with the arts.
34. I am grateful to Betty J. Blum for sending me a photocopy of the article.
35. Quoted in Prang's Chromo, Christmas 1870, p. 3. I am grateful to Paul Swenson for sending me a photocopy of the article.
36. The Sanitary Commission was still in need of funds to publish the Record of the Metropolitan Fair and volumes on the surgical practices and hospital routines developed in the field. For these publishing projects they had pictures on hand for sale, which might possibly have included Johnson's drawing. (See the "Minutes of the Meeting of the Commission," dated 29 May 1867, in the Henry Whitney Bellows Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. These minutes were by John S Blatchford, E. W. Blatchford's younger brother and the secretary of the commission, on the letterhead of the Association for the Relief of Misery. Clearly, the activities and/or the staff of the commission and the association overlapped.)Johnson, as we know, had already contributed at least one painting to the war effort when he donated The Young Sweep to the Metropolitan Fair in 1864. His contribution of the drawing The Field Hospital to the post-war cause would have been quite in character, for he continued to be sincerely humanitarian as well as patriotic. His Pension Claim Agent referred to the sort of relief work with which the Sanitary Commission was involved and that he thought it important to paint. As for his patriotism, in 1867 Johnson joined the Union League Club, an organization formed in early 1863 by several Sanitary Commissioners who had become alarmed by the lack of Union loyalty among businessmen and politicians in New York. Since Bellows was active in league activities, Johnson would have come in contact with him at least by 1867, the year in which he did the drawing.I am grateful to Paul Swenson for the information on Louis Prang, including the dates of the auctions. However, I have not been able to obtain copies of the catalogues to check whether or not the drawing was sold at auction.
37. Blum has traced the provenance of the drawing from Blatchford and his descendants through to a family physician and then to the New York art market in the early 1970s. I am grateful to Blum to sending me a photocopy of A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 3 vols. (Chicago: The A.T. Andreas Co., 1885), vol. 2, pp. 314-22.
38. The top medallion depicts Abraham Lincoln in profile, facing the viewer's right. In caps, above: MEMORIA IN AETERNA; below: ABRAHAM LINCOLN.The medallion at the bottom has one central, female figure, holding a flag with stars (no stripes visible). To the left there is a camp scene, sun rising behind; some cannon with a soldier about to fire; eagle with arrows; barrels and boxes below the figure with NWSC SAN. COMM. PAQUET. To the right a water scene with boats (steamboat, sailboat, small boat with people coming ashore). Lettering: N.W. SANITARY FAIR, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 1865.Regarding the Philadelphia medallion, the face and obverse of which are mounted at the left and right, Hurrell writes:To the left: three figures; woman's figure to the left holding a horn of plenty from which box-like objects are spilling out; two soldiers in front of a swag of drapery, the central figure with a cap; the figure to the right that of a wounded soldier without cap, reclining on a sort of couch or bed. By the boxes in very small lettering: Paquet. P. (as far as could be made out). Around the medallion: WE GIVE OUR WEALTH FOR THOSE WHO GIVE THEIR HEALTH FOR US.The medallion to the right has the following inscription: In Commemoration/ of/ the/ GREAT CENTRAL FAIR/ FOR THE/ U.S. SANITARY COMMISSION/ HELD AT/ PHILADELPHIA/ JUNE 1864.Joseph Zywicki of the Chicago Historical Society has confirmed that these reading describe the obverse and reverse of the same medallion.According to Stille, Memorial of the Great Central Fair, p. 53, the design was by C. Schuessele (Thomas Eakin's teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). Stille attributed the engraving to "Mr. Jaquet, the artist now employed by the Government to prepare the dies of all of the medals voted by Congress for military services, and it was struck off at the Min." There was an engraver in New York at mid-century named August Jaquet, but Stille's description seems to fit Anthony C. Paquet, whose biography is recounted in George C. Groce and David H. Wallace, The New-York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
39. Betty J. Blum informs me that she "does not have proof that could verify the idea [that Wight designed the frame], but it seems reasonable to assume that he did." Letter to the author dated 16 July 1983. Blatchford's earlier house, along with the records of Chicago's Sanitary Commission, was destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871.
40. Bellow's American Association for the Relief of Misery of Battle Fields had a short life, for within five years it was dissolved. Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross had been formed in Switzerland in 1863 and ratified when eleven governments signed the Geneva Treaty. This declared that doctors, nurses, hospitals, and ambulances were to be neutral during wars. (Sanitary Commission officials had been imprisoned by the Confederates during the Civil War.) Bellows had support Geneva Treaty, but it was Clara Barton, who had always remained independent of the Sanitary Commission, who actively campaigned for the Red Cross in the post-war decades. In 1881, she and several others organized the American Association of the Red Cross and brought the United States into the International Red Cross, with President Chester A. Arthur signing the order and the U.S. Senate ratifying it in 1882. (See the entry on Clara Barton in Notable American Women.)
41. Published in Naomi Rosenblum, The Lewis W. Hine Document (Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum, 1977).
42. Published in Michael E. Moss, Posters for Victory: The American Home Front and World War II Posters from the West Point Museum (West Point, New York: United States Military Academy, 1978), p. 51. Moss states that the poster was executed by either John Franklin Whitman or Paul Whitman.
43. Tuckerman, Book of Artists, pp. 469-70.
44. Stille, History of the United States Sanitary Commission, p. 387, Maxwell's Lincoln's Fifth Wheel, p. 212, gives the lower figure of 6,802, but that, too, is impressive.
45. Winslow Homer's Veteran in a New Field, 1865, and George Inness's Peace and Plenty, deal with aspects of this theme.
46. Massey, Bonnet Brigades, p. x.
47. The 60-minute documentary film, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, produced and directed by Connie Field, 1981, makes this point quite strongly.

Referenced Works of Art

1. Eastman Johnson, American, 1824-1906, The Field Hospital (The Letter Home), 1867, Oil on board , 23 X 27 1/2 inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The M. and K. Karolik Collection.
2. Eastman Johnson, The Field Hospital, 1867, Charcoal and graphite, 24 X 30 inches, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Julia B. Bigelow Fund by John Bigelow, 74.17.
3. Eastman Johnson, The Wounded Drummer Boy, 1871, Oil on canvas, 47 3/4 X 38 1/2 inches, The Union League Club, New York, Photo: Courtesy of the Frick Art Reference Library.
4. Eastman Johnson, Writing to Father, 1863, Oil on canvas, 12 X 9 1/2 inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of Maxim Karolik.
5. Our Women and the War, Harper's Weekly, 6 September 1862, Photo: Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.
6. Eastman Johnson, The Pension Claim Agent, 1867, Oil on canvas, 25 X 37 1/2 inches, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Mildred Anna Williams Collection.
7. Winslow Homer, American, 1836-1910, The Letter for Home, 1863, from Campaing Sketches, Lithograph, 14 X 10 7/8 inches, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bequest of W. G. Russell Allen.
8. Eastman Johnson's drawing of The Field Hospital with its original frame.
9. Lewis H. Hine, American, 1874-1940, Man with Artificial Arm, ca. 1919, Photograph, Collection of Naomi and Walter Rosenblum, Long Island City, New York.
10. John or Paul Whitman, Now, More than Ever—Your RED CROSS Is at His Side, 1940s, Poster, West Point Museum Collections, United States Military Academy.