Images from theStorm: 300 Civil War Images by the Author of Eye of the Storm & Prang's Civil War Pictures: The Complete Battle Chromos of Louis Prang.

Images from the Storm: 300 Civil War Images by the Author of Eye of the Storm. Written and illustrated by Robert Knox Sneden. Edited by Charles F. Bryan Jr., James C. Kelly, and Nelson D. Lankford. (New York and other cities: The Free Press, c. 2001. Pp. xxii, 263. $50.00, ISBN 0-7432-2630-8.)

Prang's Civil War Pictures: The Complete Battle Chromos of Louis Prang, with the Full "Descriptive Texts." Edited with an introduction by Harold Holzer. The North's Civil War Series. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001. Pp. [xii], 184. $50.00, ISBN 0-8232-2118-0.)

A Confederate or Union image may or may not be worth you-know-what, but the depictions in these two books are memorable and worth knowing about.

Since publication of Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey (Charles F. Bryan Jr. and Nelson D. Lankford, eds. [New York, 2000]), the amazing illustrated memoir of Robert Knox Sneden (1832-1918), readers have anticipated publication of more of his pictures. Now come three hundred paintings, one-third of the total, in Images from the Storm. The editors are the director and assistant directors of the Virginia Historical Society, which fortunately purchased Sneden's journal and paintings for all to use and enjoy. The drawings on which the watercolors are based originated during the war as Sneden, a private in the 40th New York Volunteers (the Mozart Regiment), made his way from New York City through Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia--including almost a year imprisoned at Andersonville and Camp Lawton.

During his postwar career as an architect, Sneden continued to draw and paint wartime scenes. He had fortuitously sent home his sketches before he was captured, then discarded them after they were converted to watercolors. Those in Images from the Storm date mainly from the 1890s, but only a few were published during Sneden's lifetime--in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War and in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, for example. Most of his subjects are landscapes and maps, the former often peopled with soldiers and animals in a primitive, stick-figure style. Some of the plates were also in Eye of the Storm, where they were rendered in smaller format. A comparison of one scene, Hanging of the Raiders (Andersonville, July 11, 1864), reveals that the larger reproduction is less sharp but, on the other hand, shows more of the artist's technique and eye for detail (Eye of the Storm, p. 246; Images from the Storm, pp. 214-15).

Images from the Storm lets Sneden speak for himself in captioning most of the plates, while the editors supply succinct explanatory texts. Truly, his corpus is remarkable, and the Virginia Historical Society should be applauded for bringing it to the notice of a wide audience in two beautiful books.

The German-born Louis Prang (1824-1909), by contrast, was not a veteran but a perceptive salesman and printmaker, an enabler of other artists who also wished to cash in on Civil War memories. Prang's eighteen battle prints, produced from 1886 to 1888, were best-sellers, timelessly appealing chromolithographs that are reproduced here in a single volume for the first time. The "chromos" and their accompanying descriptive texts, composed to market the prints, form the content of Prang's Civil War Pictures. Compiled by Harold Holzer, an expert in Civil War-era images and an imaginative historian and commentator, the story of the prints reveals their importance as records of the conflict as well as postwar sensibilities and popular taste. Originally measuring 17 x 23 inches, the chromos are still stunning in 5 3/4 x 8 l/2-inch copies and are accompanied by Holzer's concise explanations and testimony from participants. The latter was the result of Prang's skill as a marketer: "Wisely, he called on some of the surviving veterans of the battles to provide valuable endorsements that testified to the beauty and historical accuracy of his chromos" (p. 34).

In a substantive introduction Holzer describes the breadth of Prang's endeavors and includes numerous illustrations of his other products, e.g., portraits from photographs and paintings of subjects such as Lincoln and Hiram R. Revels and Winslow Homer's many depictions of camp life. Following the introduction are the original "descriptive texts" (no editing needed, according to Holzer [p. 49]) and the chromos themselves, which depict six battles each in East and West: Winchester on September 19, 1864; laying the pontoon bridge at Fredericksburg; Sheridan's "fabled ride from Winchester to Cedar Creek" (p. 150); July 3 at Gettysburg; Antietam; the "Bloody Angle" at Spotsylvania; Chattanooga; Kennesaw Mountain; Allatoona Pass; Sherman at Atlanta; Fort Hill (Vicksburg, June 25, 1863); and the "Hornet's Nest" at Shiloh. These are followed by six naval battles: New Orleans; the Monitor versus the Merrimac; Mobile Bay; the Kearsarge versus the Alabama, from the deck of the former; running the batteries at Port Hudson, portrayed from the defenders' perspective; and the capture of Fort Fisher.

LYNDA LASSWELL CRIST

The Papers of Jefferson Davis