This is Side Door, a podcast from a Smithsonian with support from PRX. I'm Tony Cone.

Since the earliest days of the country,

American artists have chronicled the hardships of war, on the ground as they happen.

They bear witness and bring back scenes that otherwise would only be observed by those in combat.

Selfless acts of valor, battle-scarred landscapes, fallen soldiers on

the front lines. There are images that we need to see. And remember, one of the genre's earliest American pioneers Winslow Homer is also one of the nation's best known painters.

Many classic Winslow Homer paintings feature ocean scenes. There's often a small boat bobbing perilously on an angry ocean

with someone rowing through what looks like a coin toss's chance of survival. But very early

in his career, in 1861 when he was just 25 years old, Homer found himself on the front lines of the

Civil War as something of a visual journalist.

In a time before photography was used for news, magazines and newspapers relied on artists to draw the war's action.

Before the Civil War, Winslow Homer was a printer's assistant at a magazine in Boston,

and he was doing the dirty work, putting other people's images into print.

But Winslow was a creative guy. He needed more, and boy did he get it.

And so Winslow goes down to Virginia and he hangs out in camp he comes down with

lice the food is terrible he may or may not have been captured and released in the

course of a day it's a little bit fuzzy.

This is Eleanor Harvey.

And I'm the senior curator of 19th century American art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

In 2012, Harvey put together an exhibit at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum. In 2012, Harvey put together an exhibit at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum about the Civil War

and the artists it helped create.

If you look at Winslow Homer's early wood engravings that he sent back on the trains back up to New York.

...