Introduction

As the three-day Battle of Gettysburg raged, two artists and a Union soldier produced a pictorial depiction of the action that has languished in obscurity since shortly after it was produced.

Historians have scrutinized and carefully dissected nearly every aspect of this pivotal engagement, but the “on scene” drawings these three eyewitnesses created have been almost entirely overlooked. While a handful of these images have been regularly employed as illustrations in histories of the battle, the merits of this incomparable body of work have been almost entirely forgotten or simply ignored.

These several dozen drawings comprise the only contemporaneous visual record of the engagement! Artists at Gettysburg was created to give this invaluable archive the recognition it deserves.

The collection contains the work of Alfred Waud, Edwin Forbes, and Charles Reed. Waud and Forbes worked as “special artists” for competing weekly newspapers, and Reed was a bugler in a Union artillery battery who was awarded The Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism on the second day of fighting.