Trompe l'oeil painting and the counterfeit Civil War

Mastering Illusion

On an explicit level at least, trompe l'oeil paintings did not participate in this grand reconciliation of Anglo-Saxons. Their small size precluded the group catharsis offered by cyclorama or slide show; at the same time, their status as paintings to be hung on a wall hardly encouraged the formation of familial and amicable bonds among those gathered around a photo album on the settee. The collection of small artifacts presented by these canvases spoke more of the fragmentary survival of things into the present than the remembrance of heroic acts from the past, while the paintings' inevitable disclosure of the deceptions of representation further distanced the events that had divided the nation some thirty years previously. While at odds with the vast majority of Civil War reminiscences, trompe l'oeil paintings shared much with the contemporary culture of commerce, as is evident when we examine the men who collected, displayed, and mastered these works seemingly devoted more to the loss of access to the Civil War than to its resurrection.

In 1889, the anonymous critic writing for the Daily Local News of West Chester, Pennsylvania, conjectured the ideal audience for grasping the military iconography of trompe l'oeil painting. The writer urged that Cope's Union Mementos on a Door [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED] "be secured to grace some G.A.R. Post room or some such place where veterans love to congregate."(51) The artifacts on Cope's canvas, apparently, would hold greatest meaning for members of the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest and most powerful organization for Union veterans of the Civil War. "The walls of the [Post] room," reports historian Stuart McConnell, "typically were hung with portraits of famous generals, maps of major battles, photographs, flags, and other memorabilia. Souvenirs of the war might be displayed; in some posts leftover cannon were wheeled into the hall."(52) Evaluated by veteran eyes within this setting of war pictures and souvenirs, the fragmentary remnants of exclusively Union paraphernalia assembled across the surface of Cope's canvas might well have evoked, like so many pieces of military madeleines, the full gamut of lived experience that constituted the heroic events of the Union cause. The paintings, in short, ostensibly spoke with greatest clarity and fullness to veterans.

Although (as far as I can ascertain) Union Mementos on a Door never actually managed to "grace" a GAR Post room, it did eventually spend some time on the walls of the American Legion Hall of West Chester,(53) where it would have been witnessed by veterans, if not of the Civil War then at least those from the next major American conflict, where soldiers from North and South actually did fight side by side on the banks of the Marne. But the American Legion Hall was not the destination of most trompe l'oeil canvases, nor were the old soldiers really their only audience. For, while being a veteran seemingly proved a necessary qualification for mastering these pictures, it was hardly a sufficient one. The experience of the Civil War battlefield may have rewarded its survivors with the arcane knowledge required to decipher the pictures' iconography, but it in no manner provided the means to make sense of their sophisticated play with the devices of representation, of deception and revelation.