Exterior View of Fort Sumpter
Medium
Albumen print, plate 58 from the album "Photographic Views of the Sherman Campaign" (1866)
Dimensions
Image/paper: 25.5 × 35.7 cm (10 1/16 × 14 1/16 in.); Album page: 41 × 50.5 cm (16 3/16 × 19 15/16 in.)
Classification
albumen silver print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
145557
Art Historical Context
George N. Barnard's *Exterior View of Fort Sum* (1866) captures the scarred remnants of one of the Civil War's most iconic sites. As plate 58 from Barnard's groundbreaking album *Photographic Views the Sherman Campaign*, thisen silver print documents the devastation wrought by Union General William T. Sherman's march through the South. Fort Sumter, where the war's first shots were fired in1861, stands here in quiet ruin, its walls pockmarked from relentless Confederate bombardment and later Union assaults. Barnard, a pioneering photographer who served as Sherman's official visual chronicler, ...
About the Artist
George N. Barnard · 1819–present
George N. Barnard (1819–1902) was a pioneering American photographer whose six-decade career spanned the dawn of the medium, from daguerreotypes to Civil War documentation. Born into a farming family in Coventry, Connecticut, on December 23, 1819, he lost his father at age seven and apprenticed in family businesses before marrying in 1843 and relocating to Oswego, New York. There, he launched one ...