EWPCOMPLETED IN 1865, THIS GRAND CANVAS BY Norwegian immigrant Ole Peter Hansen Balling, entitled Grant and His Generals, is more than a painting. It is a pantheon, enshrining within its heroic ten-by-sixteen-foot frame legendary commanders who secured victory for the Union on various fronts and never came together as a group until the artist united them here. Leading the way at center is General in Chief Ulysses S. Grant on a bay horse, with William T. Sherman at his side on a white horse. Few could have imagined when the war began that the bloody struggle would last as long as it did or claim so many lives. But Grant had always understood that the Union would have to battle relentlessly to prevail. “I can’t spare this man,” Abraham Lincoln once said of him; “he fights.” Grant could have said the same of his right-hand man, Sherman, who knew that there was a heavy price to be paid for victory. “War is cruelty,” he remarked. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
Among the other front-rank generals keeping pace with their chief in this cropped reproduction of Balling’s epic painting—which portrays more than two dozens generals—are Winfield Scott Hancock, known as “Hancock the Superb,” riding just to Grant’s left; and to Sherman’s right George Meade, the hero of Gettysburg; George Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga”; and Philip Sheridan, conqueror of the Shenandoah Valley. Balling made preliminary sketches of several of the commanders portrayed here when he visited Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, during the siege of Petersburg in late 1864. Others in this painting were sketched by the artist when they returned to Washington, D.C., at war’s end. A dedicated Unionist, Balling had a personal stake in the conflict, having enlisted in 1861 and served for two years in a New York regiment. EWP
UNION VICTORS Ole Peter Hansen Balling’s monumental group portrait, Grant and His Generals, was mounted within a specially made, curved frame, and graces a stairwell in what was once the Patent Office Building but is now the National Portrait Gallery.
