A Night Scout in the Southwest – Surprise of an Outpost, and Survey of the Rebel Guns (from "Harper's Weekly")

Thomas Nast

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Union success on the Civil War’s western front depended upon gaining control of the Mississippi and Ulysses S. Grant waged a series of campaigns to achieve this goal between 1861 and 1863. Published in Harper’s Weekly in April 1863, this wood engraving depicts Union scouts overpowering Confederate lookouts at night on a hill above a river fort. At this time Grant was planning an unorthodox campaign against Vicksburg, a bluff-top city in northern Mississippi that protected a key stretch of the river and had resisted multiple Union assaults. The town finally surrendered on July 4, 1863, a day after the Battle of Gettysburg ended a thousand miles to the northeast. The twenty-three-year-old Nast traveled with the army and sent drawings back to New York for publication. He had accompanied Giuseppe Garibaldi’s unification army in Italy two years before and was well prepared for such work.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art