Alfred R. Waud: Sketching as the Bloody Battle Raged
Armed with a sketchpad and charcoal pencils, reporter artist Alfred R. Waud witnessed Civil War battles and faithfully recorded the destruction.
British-born American illustrator Alfred R. Waud (1828 – 1891) was a reporter who, in picture and in story, covered the five long years of bloodshed, turmoil and tragedy of the Civil War.Â
Waud produced hundreds of energetic yet detailed sketches as a newspaper correspondent for two major publications. He captured the war’s dramatic intensity, providing not just the news but the emotion that only an artist can provide in art. Waud documented the action in Antietam, the deadliest one-day battle in American military history.
In April 1861, Waud was commissioned by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper to cover the first battle of Bull Run, as a Special Artist in the Union’s Army of the Potomac in Virginia. By the end of that year and for the remainder of the war, he worked for Harper’s Weekly sketching many significant military actions, including the Battle of Gettysburg. His depiction of Pickett's Charge in 1863 is thought to be the only visual account by an eyewitness.
Like other reporter artists of the time, Waud made faithful sketches in the field that were rushed back by courier to the newspaper, where engravers would carve the image into boxwood for printing, adding details as necessary. What he dispatched and what the paper printed was often not the same, since this conversion removed much of the immediacy and proximity in the drawings he made. Aware that his drawings would be translated to another medium, Waud used black pencil lines on mid-tone paper with white paint accents to provide a painterly sense of volume and lighting for the engravers.
Photographers, like Matthew Brady, were on scene during the Civil War but were unable to record actual combat due to the limitations of early camera technology and the inability to quickly move the cumbersome equipment. Newspapers were not able to print photos in halftone until the 1880s. It fell to these intrepid sketchpad journalists to immortalize the action in real time and with real emotion.
Following the war, Waud continued to contribute sketches to Harper’s Weekly, documenting American life in locales ranging from the Reconstruction-era South to the Western frontier. He died in 1891 at the age of 63.Â
Waud’s work still speaks to us today, as a record of the brutality of war and to the power and versatility of a drawing.
More resources:
For a more comprehensive acknowledgement of Waud’s contribution read The Eye of the Storm – How Alfred Waud’s Sketches Captured the Carnage of the U.S. Civil WarÂ
Read the blog post Drawing the War, Part 1: Alfred Waud for a deeper exploration into Waud’s life and career.
Have a look at Bill Russell’s Civil War (Reenactment) drawings here.