The Huntington Library, San Marino, CaliforniaIn this 1887 painting by Thulstrup, Major General John A. Logan’s troops attack Confederate positions on Pigeon Hill during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, fought on June 17, 1864, as part of the Union advance toward Atlanta.
“His studio at Broadway and Forty-fourth Street is so much of an arsenal, with its half a hundred army rifles of every sort, its piles of military clothes and trappings, that when the artist sits down at his easel you fully expect him, when he gets up again, to don a uniform as his legitimate dress.” So noted a writer for the journal The Book Buyer in an 1895 profile of artist Thure de Thulstrup.
The Book Buyer, Vol. 12, No. 8 (September 1895)Thure De Thulstrup
Born in Sweden in 1848, Thulstrup had attended the National Military Academy in Stockholm before receiving a commission in the French army. He served in Algiers and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, rising to the rank of captain and taking up the study of drawing in Paris along the way. (“I was more fond of fighting than of drawing in those days,” he would later write about his military service. “Those were stirring times.”)1
Thulstrup left the army after the war and, in 1872, moved to Canada, where he “kept up his drawing” and worked as a civil engineer. In 1876, he moved to New York and was employed as an illustrator for The Daily Graphic before taking a job as a staff artist for Frank Leslie’s publications. He married in 1879 and, a year later, accepted an offer from Harper & Brothers to become a regular illustrator for their titles, including Harper’s Weekly.
Over the next 20 years Thulstrup honed his talents—one supporter was his Harper’s colleague Thomas Nast, the caricaturist and editorial cartoonist—and began to study painting. “Much of my best work has been done there,” he later reflected, “and gradually I found that my forte lay in the direction of war pictures.”
As demonstrated in the following artwork, one of Thulstrup’s more frequent military subjects as both illustrator and painter was the American Civil War. By the time of his death in 1930 at 82, he had achieved prominence as one of the country’s most celebrated war artists.
Harper's WeeklyThulstrup’s depiction, published in Harper’s Weekly, of William T. Sherman’s funeral procession through the streets of New York City in February 1891.
During his years as an artist for Frank Leslie and Harper & Brothers, Thulstrup was known for his tireless work. One admirer noted that Thulstrup “could labor for as much as fifteen hours at a stretch” on illustrations involving “so many figures, so much composition and detail that the task would have appalled most artists.
Shown here is Thulstrup’s depiction, published in Harper’s Weekly, of William T. Sherman’s funeral procession through the streets of New York City in February 1891. An accompanying article described the scene: “[T]he procession … took its way through the great avenues of the city, with … the solemn strains of music, the glitter and pomp of military and naval uniforms, [and] the splendor of the lines of gray-haired veterans, who will so soon follow their leader into the grave….”
"Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" Wounded and straggling Union soldiers walking toward the rear as ammunition wagons headed for the front at the Battle of Shiloh.
In the 1880s, Century magazine solicited and published firsthand accounts of the Civil War by Union and Confederate veterans (subsequently repackaged as the multivolume book series Battles and Leaders of the Civil War). A number of prominent artists were enlisted as illustrators, including Thulstrup, who was then with Harper & Brothers. As he recalled in 1895, “By that time I had made some reputation as an illustrator of army life, and when the Century people began their war series of articles I was invited to take part, and since then I have taken commissions from all quarters.”
"Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" The “charge of a sutler” trying to escape the fighting at Gaines’ Mill through G.B. Anderson’s Confederates.
"Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" The capture of a Confederate battery at Shiloh by men of the 18th Illinois Infantry.
Among the commissions Thulstrup accepted was to illustrate Homer Greene’s A Lincoln Conscript (1909), a novel about Bob Bannister, a Pennsylvania boy who in 1863 tries to enlist in the Union army at 17 in hopes authorities will accept him in place of his Copperhead father, who had been drafted but refused to report—and as a result had a warrant out for his arrest. His plan rebuffed, Bob decides to enlist anyway, hoping his show of patriotism might redeem the family name.
"A Lincoln Conscript" (1909)Thulstrup’s depiction of young Bob Bannister unsuccessfully pitching his original plan to a provost marshal.
"A Lincoln Conscript" (1909)As a Union army lieutenant, Bob Bannister being visited by President Abraham Lincoln while recovering from a battle wound.
In his Civil War watercolors—commissioned and reissued as chromolithographs by printer and publisher Louis Prang, who paid the artist between $250–$500 per painting—Thulstrup depicted a variety of dramatic scenes of land battles fought in the eastern and western theaters, including these next five.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, CaliforniaUnion soldiers under fire as they lay a pontoon bridge across the Rappahannock River during the Battle of Fredericksburg.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, CaliforniaA Union attack during the Siege of Vicksburg.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, CaliforniaA failed Confederate assault on a fortified Union position at the Battle of Allatoona Pass.
The Huntington Library, San Marino, CaliforniaThe repulse of Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Writer, fellow illustrator, and admirer Perriton Maxwell noted a particular aspect of Thulstrup’s military paintings “Especially in the violent action of the horse does he display rare powers of observation and a knowledge of equine peculiarities quite uncommon,” Maxwell wrote in 1895. “His horses trot or gallop, rear or plunge, balk or stand immovable but alert, at the will or whim of his brush.”
The Huntington Library, San Marino, CaliforniaThulstrup’s depiction of Union cavalry overwhelming a Confederate position at the Third Battle of Winchester on September 19, 1864.
Sources
The Book Buyer, Vol. 12, No. 8 (September 1895); The Quarterly Illustrator, Vol. 1 (January–March 1893); Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. XVIII (1936); The New York Times, June 10, 1930.
