Sunday Focus: The Mystery of Manet's CSS Alabama Painting

     From a Lancaster, Pennsylvania newspaper's article about John Graver Johnson, an attorney who left his art collection to a Philadelphia museum.

“Old Masters Now: Celebrating the Johnson Collection,” an exhibit that opened Friday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Upon his death 100 years ago, Johnson, who represented a variety of corporate clients and was rumored to have been offered a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, had amassed 1,279 paintings and more than 200 other works of art."

One of them is this work:

"Edouard Manet’s 1864 oil painting “The Battle of the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama” depicts the gunfight between the Union and Confederate ships during the Battle of Cherbourg.

It’s another example of how recent scholarship has changed the understanding of how the painting was created, the curators say.

Long thought to have been painted by Manet from a spectator ship during the battle, research has led historians to believe he created it from newspaper accounts in Paris."

Capt/ Raphael Semmes, on The CSS Alabama

    


    




       To learn more about The CSS Alabama..and what the heck it was doing off the coast of France in 1864...visit the blog that Bob Corley and I created at APT as we tried to produce a documentary about the ship and her captain. We were jettisoned from the network before we could get even knee deep, to stretch nautical terms too, too far. 

[Sunday Focus is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com, celebrating a 10th Anniversary on Thanksgiving Day!]