Battle of Nashville, Tennessee. [United States Colored Troops]

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Between the 1880s and 1890s, Kurz & Allison issued thirty-six chromolithographic battle views of the Civil War. As Holzer and Neely observe, their work is distinctive for its treatment of African American soldiers. While lithographers such as Prang avoided depictions of Black combatants entirely, Kurz & Allison placed them at the center of the action. Their Storming of Fort Wagner “remains the best extant depiction of that event in nineteenth-century art,” and their Battle of Nashville (the present print) “shows Confederate soldiers retreating and surrendering before Black infantrymen who triumphantly mount their abandoned parapets…”

“Leaving aside their Monitor and Merrimac view, where the role of blacks is marginal, one still finds that Kurz & Allison featured black soldiers in four of their thirty-six prints, more than ten percent of the series. And this was not a matter of incidental inclusion; on the contrary, the black soldiers are the focus of the action in three and crucial to the action in the fourth (Nashville).” (Holzer and Neely)

By situating men of the United States Colored Troops so prominently within these compositions, Kurz & Allison underscored their combat role at Nashville and fixed their presence in the broader public memory of the war during the closing decade of the nineteenth century. As Peters notes, Louis Kurz himself was a Union veteran, muralist, and personal friend of Abraham Lincoln.

Price: $450.00