Catalogue Entry
Johnson was thirty-six years old when the Civil War began. Although he did not serve in the Union Army, he followed the Union troops in search of subjects that would appeal to a pro-Union audience. He also painted pictures of the homefront. —PH
Hills, in Hills and Carbone, 1999, p. 136: "According to Baur, Johnson was near Bull Run in 1862, was at Antietam on September 17, 1862, and marched with the Union Army through Maryland following the battle of Gettysburg in 1863.
"The result of the March trip was the picture A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, which exists in three versions. Johnson felt it important to document the scene as truthful, as an actual event that he had witnessed, for he inscribed on the back of the canvas version: 'A veritable incident/in the civil war seen by/myself at Centerville [sic]/on this morning of/McClellan's advance towards Manassas March 2[3], 1862/Eastman Johnson.' The carefully annotated, documented eyewitness account of events became part of the ethos of reportage during the Civil War. The wood engravers who worked for Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and translated the sketches of the war artists into engravings to be reproduced in those weeklies regularly included inscriptions documenting that the war-correspondent artist had actually seen the event."
See the artwork page on the Brooklyn Museum website for additional discussion of this painting.
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