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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast. I am Jeremiah Regan, and I am pleased to be joined for the final time in this series by Professor Emeritus of Art, Sam Knecht, as we discuss Lecture 4 of American Paintings, Battle Scenes. Welcome, Sam.
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B
Thank you, Jeremiah.
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C
Glad to be back.
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B
And very, very excited about enticing our audience to delve into all four of these online lectures.
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A
As am I. We spoke in the introduction of the last episode about art and not being a discipline or a medium just for the elites, just for the highbrow. And I think that comes through in your selection of the subject matter for the final lecture, battle scenes, which are not often regarded as highbrow art.
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C
Well, absolutely.
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B
But you can't talk about American history and American culture without dealing with the history of war and the struggles of the military, all branches of the military service and those branches, whether officially or even in the early decades of the country unofficially, artists have been in the front lines sometimes, or at least close to the front lines, and depicting what was going on in actual battles in the the army camps, in the ship decks of the Navy, and more. And so it seemed like you can't talk about American art history and neglect the military side of things.
- [01:52]
A
And as our listeners know from having heard the first three lectures in this course, you describe various ways in which the painters communicate the message. They leave hints to the spirit that they're trying to portray. And you talk about some of the things that the viewer should look for in a painting, the way it's arranged, the way light is used, the different shapes that figures are arrayed in. And we see these in military paintings and in battle scenes, just as we do in other other subject matters.
- [02:24]
B
Well, absolutely, Jeremiah. And so much of what we encounter in this particular subject matter area is narrative, telling the story, really trying to communicate to the viewer, you are there, you're an eyewitness to, say, the Battle of Bunker Hill. I felt I had to include that one. It's one of several such works that are standouts in American history. And yet in looking at works like the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull, the more you look, the more you see, the more you also imagine what you're not seeing, because the artist must, of necessity constrict himself to a moment in time. Currently I'm reading book number two of Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the American Revolution. But in his first book, the British Are Coming, he does a deep dive into the Battle of Bunker Hill or Breed's Hill, nevermind the misnomer But Trumbull, in doing that painting, he was almost a direct eyewitness of the, the killing of Dr. Joseph Warren in that battle over overlooking Boston Harbor. And the painting only hints at what the, the British soldiers did with the body of Joseph Warren once they shot and killed him and, and started stabbing him with their bayonets. The degradation was absolutely horrific. But it's the kind of painting which in Trumbull's handling is somewhat glorified but also very, very factual in its recording of the uniforms, the gestures, the smoke of the battle, the distant view of the Boston harbor and so on. So anyone who paints a military history, whether a battle or behind the scenes subject, they had to get it right.
- [04:41]
A
So one may wonder, particularly today, why we need paintings when we have photography. But what you're hinting at is while the painter strives for accuracy and indeed achieves accuracy, they have a way of being selective in what they depict, the moment that they depict, and in telling the story behind it in a way that a photographer who's, who's capturing a brief moment in real time does not have access to.
- [05:10]
C
Yeah, the painter, if the painter has true skill.
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B
And so many of these, well, any of them that we selected for the course had a huge dose of true skill. They had the opportunity nevertheless, to edit, to rearrange, and for artistic effect. One of the worst things that a novice artist can do in building a picture is to have something going on in the picture which is irrelevant to the focal point. And I often have counseled art students that, you know, this scene's about, for example, it might be about Romeo and Juliet, but if you've got Rosencrantz and Guildenstern off to the side arguing and.
- [05:54]
C
Gesturing wildly.
- [05:58]
B
That'S a distraction. So the painter has the opportunity in, in the deliberate long time of working in the studio to rearrange, to do studies and to kind of rearrange the, the players on the chessboard until he gets it right so that the meaning and the intent of the painting will be fundamentally clear. And that's what some of these artists accomplished in spades. Like Winslow Homer with his prisoners from the front.
- [06:31]
A
Tell us a little bit about that remarkable painting in which we see three Confederate soldiers who have surrendered, facing their Union captor.
- [06:41]
B
Yeah, that one I thought was a wonderful example. Even though it's not a battle scene per se, it is the aftermath of a battle. And so the story that it suggests is embedded in the painting as much as the actual illustration of the characters involved. One of the great things that Homer did. And by the way, Homer was an eyewitness to the Civil War battlefront. He was an illustrator who would do sketches and send them back to New York. Artists working for Harper's Weekly would turn those into engravings. And in each new issue, each weekly issue of Harper's, they would see visual reports from the battlefront. But in this painting, Homer did something, I think that's extremely clever, and that is he has the horizon line, the distant landscape. You can imagine what that battle was like back, back in the far distance of that picture. But the horizon line cuts just above each of the men's shoulders. Some of us artists like to call that skying. The head. In other words, their heads poke up into the sky. And so the darker tones of their heads and headgear and what have you make those heads pop out unmistakably against the sky. And there's no question who the important characters are in here and the linkage that the horizon line draws together between them. And you can't. Your eyes, as you look at the painting, are riveted on the faces of those men and what their condition is expressing.
- [08:33]
A
I'm putting myself into the position of a listener right now, maybe driving in their car or mowing their lawn. And I'm certain they're listening to this description, riveted and yet wanting, seeing it in their mind's eye and wishing to see it with their eye. And so I would encourage everyone, as I did in the last introduction, to enroll in the course. You've learned by listening, which is outstanding. Now do yourself the favor of seeing with your eyes and beholding these paintings that Sam is describing by going to Hillsdale Edu Course. That's Hillsdale Edu Course to enroll in American Paintings for free. Sam, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining us to discuss this amazing course. You did well.
- [09:18]
B
Thank you very much, Jeremiah. It's a pleasure all the way around.
- [09:21]
C
All the preparation, delivery of the course.
- [09:23]
B
And if someone wants to email me after taking the course, you've got a question or a comment, I'll be happy to respond.
- [09:31]
A
A very generous offer. Now let's turn to the final lecture of American paintings. Lecture four Battle Scenes.
- [09:44]
C
Thanks for joining me. Again, the focus for this, our final lecture in the series on American painting is military art. Subjects from military history occupy a special place in the annals of the armed forces. These subjects ought to enjoy a little more coverage in standard art history textbooks. Nevertheless, there have been incredibly talented artists that have teamed up with the military to observe and record their stories. It may interest you that there are even highly talented members of the enlisted corps and even a few officers that have an honored place in these traditions. Even the new space force has its share of military art, and each one has its own huge collection of images that are worthy of your attention together. Let's take a look at all of this and see in roughly chronological order, some of the best that the military has to offer. These works deserve even more coverage than ever in the annals of American art history. Now on your screen is the Battle of Bunkers Hill, June 17, 1775. It was done in 1786 by John Trumbull. Let's begin by correcting a famous mistake. It was not Bunker's Hill, but rather Breed's Hill that was the subject for this famous battle and thus this painting. I want to begin by telling you a little bit about the artist because you may be familiar already with him. It's John Trumbull who did the iconic painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and of course, that is wound up on American paper currency. Trumbull had in mind doing the Declaration painting and this and many others to serve as a grand series of paintings, huge paintings that would tell the story of the Revolutionary War. This painting, though not terribly large, is nevertheless, I think, a stirring example of what Trumbull did in the depiction of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Trumbull was actually an eyewitness to this battle. He watched it through binoculars from a distance and saw many of the aspects of this battle which went back and forth between the colonials on the hilltop and the British that were trying to charge up from below with their bayoneted rifles. One after another, these attacks by the British were beaten back. But the Brits were successful. Eventually, when the colonials ran out of ammunition in the midst of this chaos, an American was shot down by the British. He was Dr. Joseph Warren, a well known Bostonian physician and respected leader and speaker on the cause of freedom. He was cut down by a British bullet. He's shown dressed in white here in his dying gasps, lying on the ground in the foreground of this picture, Looking more closely at Bunker Hill. Let's zoom in and look at the grouping of Dr. Warren here lying prone on the ground, mortally wounded. And two colonials, they're trying to fend off the murderous attack of British redcoats. Here one is ready to lunge his, his musket and bayonet into the prone body of Warren. We know that from accounts that Warren was repeatedly bayoneted. What a horrible thing to do to a man already dying. But then, looking overall at this composition, which I've been stressing is one of great fury and action. It's one that has surging diagonals in its setup throughout. There is a big central movement here of dark tones and deep reds and black hats and so on that sweeps across the composition from lower right to upper left. That's echoed in the movement of these clouds here, clouds of cannon smoke and more. In contrast to that, and also in contrast to the brightness of these figures, we have a spill of light likewise moving diagonally. Smart artists know that if you want to create movement in a picture, that you use diagonals, and that's certainly true here. There is nary a straight horizontal or vertical line anywhere. Tilting, slashing movements of swords and bayonets abound in the picture, and that creates a kind of crackling excitement and drama to the whole thing. On a lesser note, we have another.
- [15:09]
B
Victim of the bloodshed for a little.
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C
Bit of balance at the least, and that is a British officer is shown here, also brightly lit and falling into the arms of his companions. Historians have been able to identify a number of these figures in this painting, and we credit Trumbull in his diligence in not only having seen this as an eyewitness, but doing his diligent research to get the facts right in this painting. Moving forward in time, we'll now see a few images relating to that great horrible conflict of America, its civil war. I want to tell you about the work done in that war by an artist illustrator who illustrated both combat and behind the scenes pictures. His name was Winslow Homer. Right now we're seeing a quick sketch that he did of a cavalry officer about to slice open a rebel whose face is scribbled down in the lower left. Homer was assigned by a New York newspaper called Harper's Weekly Illustrated. And Harper's Weekly, week by week, offered its readers not just prose about the war, but also pictures. Mind you, they didn't have a way of reproducing a picture as scribbly as this one, but rather, when Winslow Homer was able to do somewhat more finished drawings, they would quickly be sent back from the battlefront by courier to New York City. There, in the offices of Harper's Weekly, trained engravers would translate those drawings into wood engravings, which were then situated on the printing presses. And thus pictures were injected into each issue of Harper's Weekly. Homer was already a skilled observer of people before the war. In peacetime, he did many scenes of ordinary folks enjoying themselves in recreation, like skating on Frozen ponds or visiting the seaside. He had a great gift for very quickly summing up poses that were very understandable and entertaining even. But when the war broke out, his gifts were trained in the service of readership in the north as the Union army fought against the Confederacy. Here's an engraving that appears in the newspaper based on Homer's drawings of a cavalry charge. It suggests to you just how skilled he was in portraying an action scene, a combat scene with plenty of different dynamic poses and charging in action. But this kind of training, this experience, was brought to bear shortly after the war when Homer decided to do a couple of pictures that dealt with the theme of the war and the drama and pathos that it represented behind the scenes, in addition to what had happened on the battlefront. Now we look at Homer's painting entitled Prisoners from the front. It was painted in 1866 in oil, and it's about 3ft wide in actuality. Moving into the prisoner's painting, the let's look at these Confederates. We have this fellow standing arrogantly as he stares at the figure of the Union officer, who's actually a brigadier general who has come to confront these troops, perhaps to rub it in that they are the losers in this engagement. Next to the Confederate, who's in a relatively full uniform from his kepi cap down to his knee boots. And we move past him to this rather forlorn looking older gentleman, his hair bedraggled, full beard definitely aged and looking resigned when you see the way his hands are clasped together rather resignedly next to him. The young lad here who I think is clueless about this situation, he seems to stare vacantly across the scene to the general. In Homer's characterization of the three prisoners, this recalls a device in the history of art involving the ages of man. Here we have the youth or prematurity. Next, the old man post maturity, and then finally this Confederate here in the prime of his life in maturity. All of this seems to weave together, to hint at the passage of time, the problems of growing old and eventually dying. Back to our mature soldier here. His defiance, his haughty pose suggest that he is not going to surrender his spirit to the Union captor. On the other hand, we see resignation in these characters. And it's also a sad commentary on the state of the Confederate army near the end of the war, that few trained uniformed soldiers were left and the south had to resort to to drafting and constricting anyone that they could get their hands on, whether a young farm boy or an aged man. Now, each one of these Characters is fully developed in terms of details of age, clothing, costume and so on. So a lot of sharp focus on their development as figures. The same is true of, of the Brigadier General. But when we look into the painting, into deeper space, in the middle ground are more Union soldiers with their horses and so on. It adds to the detail and the illustration and the story of this painting. When Homer did the foreground figures, he treated them with deeper tones, more contrast, more development. A wise painter, he has softened and lost detail, more or less simplifying and almost flattening out the characters of the soldiers in the background. That keeps them back there where they belong instead of crowding and distracting into the foreground. Notice other details here, like what we call isocephaly. That's where the head heads of the major figures are all lined up on the same horizontal. And those heads are popping up above the implied horizon line of the picture established by this hill shape over here. So their heads are popping up into the sky. And that's given rise in this type of painting and others where a similar device is used to the term skying. It is a really effective device for emphasizing the most important characters in the scene. And those heads are juxtaposed against a rather soft and somber gray green sky with horizontal shafts of clouds, which tends to accord very nicely with the repetition of horizontals here, from belts and hands to the level of the heads to the position of feet on the ground. And so, in a way, there is a great kind of finality and stability to the painting. And finally, I want to point out that it's natural. But there is a space between the prisoners and the captor, the general. One wonders if that space, that empty space, will ever be bridged. Will south and north ever get back together in a full union? That previous year, Winslow Homer produced another picture which is a reflection on the aftermath of the Civil War. This is called the Veteran in a New field, done in 1865. Again, Winslow Homer. Here we see a almost faceless fellow, a farmer, ostensibly, and he's wielding a scythe, the kind of hay raking and cutting tool with a long blade that farmers used to harvest wheat. Perhaps you get the obvious symbol here. The scythe is a replacement now for a sword. And it even could remind you of the biblical passage that swords should be beaten into plowshares. Winslow Homer has elected to show. This farmer in a bright white shirt is back to us, but he stands before a rather golden, slightly orange tinted field, which in a way is like a wall of wheat that practically looks impenetrable. One could wonder if this was reminiscent of a battle, when a soldier has his entire focus on a regiment of enemy that would seem invincible and impenetrable. And beyond that, in the foreground are shafts of wheat scattered about, glinting in the bright noonday sun. And those could remind the farmer himself of those that were cut down in the battle of friends and and foes alike, mowed down by countless numbers. Once again, we see this painting brings our focus to an important character by the device of bright contrast, the white shirt against the golden wheat, but also how the head and hat of the farmer is skied against the horizon line, popping up into that blue sky. This becomes a familiar device as Homer paints future figures in nature. And it shows the figures back to us, where we see the individual not as a portrait type, but rather as an archetype, one who stands for countless others of the same sort, which with the same experiences. That hints at Homer's ability to create universals with very particularized scenes. Another leap forward chronologically, we now go to World War I and a battle scene painted in 1918 by American artist Samuel Johnson Wolfe. Cloth kepi hats are now exchanged for helmets, and beyond that, gas masks and the horrors of painting in France in a muddy field choked with barbed wire fencing and choked even more by poison gas. Samuel Wolf was a New York trained artist who, before the war, was making a living doing society portraits. But when America finally entered World War I, Collier's magazine hired him to join the American forces in France. And so he went and started doing sketches that could serve as canvases for scenes such as this, which he did after the war. Now, interestingly enough, Wolf said later on, there were times when he was stuck in the trenches with the American soldiers that he had to put down his sketch pad and attend to things that were much more important, like helping the wounded or taking care of cooking meals when the actual cook was killed. So, in other words, there were times when an artist had to abandon the comforts of doing a society picture, a pretty landscape, or what have you, and attend to serious duty for the protection of comrades in the armed forces, and possibly even defending liberty at home. I'd like for you to study the design of this painting, the way the shapes are put together, and learn how that accentuates drama and impact. The soldier in the right foreground, who is seen in silhouette, has a gas mask, and his form almost merges that with a comrade who is slumped to the ground, probably wounded. Together they create a figure triangle, a device I've already referenced. They are seen against a backdrop of a cloud of smoke, or better yet, or worse yet, poison gas, mustard gas or chlorine gas. The effects of that were devastating. Now in the middle distance, we see other soldiers that are ahead of him in the charge. Increasingly, as they get smaller, smaller and merging into the depths of the clouds, they become harder to read. And that makes me think of the chaos of war and the confusion and the lack of ability to make things out securely in the distance. In this case, even made more terrible by poison gas. This is a nighttime scene. The brilliance of lighting in the middle distance, though, is caused by flares that have been fired overhead. You see the glint of a couple of flares in the dark navy sky near the upper portion of this canvas. This is the kind of painting that actually was appreciated by Americans at home when Wolf did these canvases, and they are part of the vivid record of war that Wolf was able to provide. Before we leave it, I'd like to comment finally on his use of paint, which is very heavy, very swift and dynamic. The paint squiggled on this way and that enough to describe so that you understand the scene, but also enough to express the bewildering fracas of the war.
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- [32:01]
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- [32:59]
C
For our next painting. This is John Singer Sargent's painting entitled Simply Gassed. It was done in 1919 for the British War Museum who, knowing of Sargent's talents Both there, France and the United States hired him to do a huge painting for a museum of the war. It was to go into a large hall that would be a hall of remembrance in Sargent's way of remembering the war. He actually had journeyed to battlefronts in France and was eyewitness to scenes like this of soldiers that were wounded and afflicted by poison gas. He creates this painting which acts as a kind of sorrowful frieze of figures that march almost blindly from left to right. One reaches to touch the soldier in front of him. There's a great deal of variety in this picture where this freeze of soldiers marches almost helplessly groping to make their way toward an unseen man medical tent before them, they are not able to make out the figures of dying and wounded that stretch across the foreground. This is a painting that I consider especially full of pathos and remembrance and of dread. It's a painting where the sky behind the soldiers brings their figures out in its lightness. But it's a smutty brownish gray, perhaps even reminiscent of the poison gas that has affected these men. It's a very tragic painting and it's huge. It's something like 20ft in width. You can't help but be moved by was courageous on the part of the British Admiralty in addition to the American artist John Singer Sargent in having this painting brought into being and placed in such an important spot. Cheerful topics never have their place in pictures connected with war. But here we see a subject that is a war recruiting poster, the sort of thing that's also a caution to civilians. You see the message loud and clear. If you tell where he's going, he may never get there. It's a stern warning, but notice the confident, cheerful grin of the seaman who looks over his shoulder back at you, the viewer. He wants you to know that he means business and his mission is vastly important. With effortless ease, he carries a huge duffel over his shoulder and that suggests that he is a strong guy. And I feel like he's a character right out of central casting in Hollywood. He looks like the guy next door with white teeth and good looks, and he is totally confident and optimistic as he marches past us. Now, in terms of design, I'd like you to notice that there are very bold, simple shapes here that catch the eye. In their silhouette, there is a dark shadow of the duffel bag which merges with the dark navy of his uniform. You see a strong silhouetting of his arm and his hand moving down into the lower right of the picture all pretty much fairly flat colors, all meant for easy reproduction and easy reading and recognition by the general public. Notice. Also to aid that simplicity is that there is no background here, no landscape, no houses, no nothing. The message is front and center, and you are meant to understand and realize the importance of keeping your mouth shut. Another picture that happens to be in the Navy collection is on the screen now. This is called Victory Sparks. It's kind of a catchy title, actually. It was done in the 1940s by artist Howard Baer. This was done, of course, in World War II, when so many men had to leave their civilian jobs, their shops, their gas stations, their factories and more, their farms, and join the armed forces, Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force. Those jobs going vacant had to be filled by women. So by scores and hundreds of them, they took over the jobs that were left behind. Skilled jobs using dangerous machines, such as this woman who stands there with a grinding machine, handling the grinding of some piece of metal, maybe a tool or an implement necessary for a machine, maybe even a tank, for that matter. The grinding causes a shower of sparks to flutter down in the lower part of the composition. And incidentally, this being a watercolor painting, this is the white of the paper left protected, reserved. Its shape and its sparking beauty is brought out by painting around it instead of within it. One of the hallmarks of effective watercolor painting, she is a wave standing as an acronym for women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. This was a branch of the Navy filled by women. Think Rosie the Riveter. She's one of scores and hundreds of women who stepped up. And this painting, I think, does honor to this particular wave because we don't see it as a portrait likeness. Her face is obscured by her protective mask. What brings us up to her face, though, and makes us wonder about her service and her individuality is that blue headscarf, the only bright color anywhere in the painting. Everything else is painted in tones of quiet browns and grays. But there is a presence here, dark and light contrast, which makes this a kind of punchy painting of duty, loyalty and service that is memorable. Staying with World War II imagery, we now come to an oil painting entitled Sinking sun, done in 1942 by Lieutenant Commander Griffith Bailey Cole. We're seeing a naval seaman in helmet standing on the prow of a naval fighting ship, staring at the setting sun. I think you'll probably understand the significance of that sunset as well as the title of the painting. It's a reference to the Japanese flag, which you see, incidentally, spread on the coffins that are pictured on the right foreground of the picture. So these coffins contain the bodies of dead Japanese pilots, and in a moment they will probably be confined to the deep as a reasonable burial at sea. This is a painting that's very striking in its patterns of color, not just light and dark, although that's there in the plenty after all. The naval soldier there is a very dark silhouette, and he's accompanied also by the image of another soldier way down in the lower right corner. But the main star of the picture is that sunset which carries with it not a sense of doom from the Japanese standpoint, but rather of eventual victory, the final defeat hoped for in this part of the war. This, after all, 1942 was on the verge of the Battle of Midway, a huge turning point for the American Navy and the American cause in the aftermath of that victorious battle. Now, artist Cole was someone who was getting attracted to poster like designs in art at this time, part of his art school training and trends that were going on in the 1940s. He actually had gone at the outset of the war to Admiral Nimitz to suggest that the Navy start hiring artists to be combat correspondents. And Nimitz agreed, and thus started the Navy collection of art that is with us today. Cole's painting helped to serve a mission to maintain confidence and optimism and success toward mission that would serve not just the armed forces, but the folks at home that could see a painting like this. Some combat artists like Cole, feature design qualities, almost decorative qualities, in some of their works. Well, in stark contrast to that, we now come forward to times in recent memory, the Vietnam War. This is a painting entitled Vietnam Episode. First Core Area, oil on canvas by Robert L. Benny. Bennie was embedded with US regiments during the Vietnam War. And here's a painting that he did which illustrates a particularly devastating incident of a Vietnamese village having been attacked by the Viet Cong. Explosions, fire, a great deal of wounded all occurred in that battle that Benny illustrates. In the lower left foreground, you see what appears to be three figures, possibly two Marines and a Navy corpsman administering aid to a Vietnamese woman. Not just a comrade soldier, but a woman who's been put on a stretcher. There's an IV that has been attached to her, and these men, whose faces are pretty much shadowed and thus anonymous, are getting ready to take her to the rescue of a helicopter nearby. As your eye travels across this painting in the middle distance and eventually toward the background, one by one, you see scenes of chaos, of wounded, of soldiers administering aid, and quite a Variety. In this horrific scene, as you move back toward the helicopter in the distance, you see men struggling to carry stretchers with wounded and to empty them and to load them happily into a chopper that's on the ground. It's a Piasecki chopper. And then hovering in the air above that, we see a Chinook chopper as well. The painting is full of frenetic chaos of painting slathered on choppily, heavily thick paint. And there's a great deal of light and dark contrast that bristles through the painting. The sky full of the smoke of battle, of clouds and bursts of light, perhaps from explosions. And it's a painting that I feel justly illustrates the. The bewildering chaos of war. Throughout this painting we see artist Benny has dealt in a very intentional style that you could even call messy. Of course, it's cliche to say that war is messy, but here he has dramatized the action of the scene with all kinds of forceful dabs of paint, heavy paint punched onto the canvas in swirls and dabs and so on. There's nothing pretty about this. It has a great deal of grungy activity throughout, and I feel that that's why I wanted to include it in this lecture, because of this sort of dynamic energy and calamity. In this series on military art, we've come a long way from a pre revolutionary battle at Bunker Hill, A long chronology stretching forward to recent memory. This is a painting titled the Hazara Province, Afghanistan, done in 2003 by soldier Elsie Ray Golden. Golden was a sergeant first class who was deployed by the army to go to Afghanistan during its war. And there he painted many scenes, not so much of actual combat with the enemies, but rather of the day to day activities and duties of army soldiers. Here a team of four is shown overlooking a vast, long, deep valley with a road encircling through it. This province, I know from my reading, was the scene of genocide that was happening during that Afghanistan war. Not by our forces certainly, but by other combatants. This team of four, this small platoon, are dressed in desert camel and they have very heavy looking packs, cloth covered helmets and so on. And even though we see two soldiers whose faces are turned in profile, this is by no means the kind of picture meant to glorify particular individuals, but rather as Winslow Homer had done in many of his paintings, we're presented with types. The two tallest soldiers in the foreground have their backs turned to us, but in so doing, the artist and they together seem almost to invite us to put ourselves in their place. To enter this scene, which is so believably researched and illustrated, and contemplate what they are doing and their sense of mission. In the end, I want you to know that the service branches each maintain traditions and collections that are vast when it comes to their holdings in museums and other venues. They are available for the public to see in person and with impressive examples of the skill and the dedication of these artists in telling the military story. What's accomplished in these paintings, these pictures done by combat artists and soldiers and sailors and others alike, is something that we cannot take for granted. There is a sense of mission, of duty, protecting American freedom, setting example for the world that is shared by all of them. It's as if these artists want to help us put ourselves in their shoes, or their combat boots for that matter, and see these scenes firsthand and appreciate the kind of dedication, willingness to risk life and limb that goes part and parcel with being enlisted. I think that the combat artists and the enlisted artists that that have done this kind of work are to be commended for their attention to truth. For all the emphasis I've tried to put on honesty in these lectures, it should be stated that these artists have indeed been attentive to facts, getting the facts of uniforms, of equipment and ordinance right to tell those stories with great credibility. But perhaps more importantly, what the artists, the best of them have done, is to convey a feeling of the emotions of being in the military. Whether behind the scenes, sacked out on a cot in an army tent, or on the deck of a ship or in the cockpit of a plane. The emotions of fear, anxiety, but courage and great resolve, dedication to the mission. These are members that came out of our communities, people that were our next door neighbors, that have joined the ranks of the military in service to the nation and its greater ideals, those of patriotism and the defense of freedom. In concluding these lectures on American painting, I want to stress that American art is full of vital, unforgettable images, helping us understand national stories. The takeaway I have for these lectures is my wish that you as viewers would understand that there are great documents of American art that portray a range of leaders, patriots and presidents, of gorgeous, breathtaking scenery, fascinating scenes in towns, villages and cities as well. We've looked at the common man and we've looked at our brave military as depicted in art. What I'd like to have you take from this is a sense that there is so much more than meets the eye in just a few choice examples. Put it all together. We have pieces in an American quilt of all kinds of experience and individuals that make up the fabric of America. I want you to understand that these are works done with great care, resolve, conviction, and hard work. These paintings that we've studied are not mere wall decoration, but they are pictures that invite us to enter in, to go shoulder to shoulder with the people depicted, or to gaze out on the vast stretches of the land or the streets of the city, as the case may be. All of this rolled together becomes a part of our American experience, our American heritage. And I want you to feel that we've just scratched the surface with these lectures and that there's so much more that you can enjoy, appreciate, and use to understand how great it is to be in America and have arts that have opportunities to express and to record the way the artists have done in this series.
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