Field Where General Reynolds Fell, Gettysburg
Timothy O'Sullivan (American, born Ireland, 1840–1882)
July 1863
- Medium
- Albumen print, pl. 37 from the album "Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, vol. 1" (1866)
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Image/paper: 17.7 × 22.9 cm (7 × 9 1/16 in.); Album page: 31.1 × 44.6 cm (12 1/4 × 17 9/16 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- Gift of Mrs. Everett Kovler
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Along with Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan was one of the primary photographers of the American Civil War. Using wet-plate glass negatives, a cumbersome and labor-intensive technology that did not allow for images of active battle, O'Sullivan concentrated on the war's harrowing aftermath. This photograph depicts a scene following the Battle of Gettysburg, one of the war's bloodiest confrontations, in which thousands of men on both sides lost their lives. The lifeless, exposed bodies of the six soldiers who appear in the photograph had been picked over by survivors searching for shoes and other valuables. This image was among 44 of O'Sullivan's photographs included in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, one of the first published collections of Civil War photographs.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
