BGuthrie Photos: VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Museum of History and Culture (VMHC) -- The Lost Cause: Myths, Monuments, & Murals (Four Seasons of the Confederacy Mural)

VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Museum of History and Culture (VMHC) -- The Lost Cause: Myths, Monuments, & Murals (Four Seasons of the Confederacy Mural):

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. VHS4SE_140112_062.JPG: The Studies: A graduate of Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Charles Hoffbauer was thoroughly versed in French academic procedures of painting large-scale themes of grandeur and historical importance. In preparing the Confederate murals, he used a full repertoire of those techniques, illustrated by the studies in this room. These are a sampling of several hundred sketches and more than a dozen models he prepared. Unable to view events fifty years in the past, Hoffbauer by necessity invented the scenes of his murals. His production of imagery was a gradual process. One means by which the artist developed initial ideas of composition was the small ink and watercolor sketch. No less effective a device in the first stages of development were clay and wood models, which allowed Hoffbauer to invent and refine compositions. Literally dozens of very small ink and pencil sketches (arranged on matboard by the artist) were a means to develop precise details of imagery. The small sketches were tested on a large scale in some sixty crayon and pastel drawings, four of which are framed here. Most of the pastels, like most of the small drawings, are rendered on grids, which routinely were used as a means to enlarge and transfer figures from a small to a larger scale. In that process, the details in each small square of a grid is repeated in the corresponding square of a larger grid.
2. VHS4SE_140112_078.JPG: Sample Studies for the Spring Mural Hoffbauer tried parading a column of soldiers past Stonewall Jackson in different directions. Once he decided to position the troops moving toward the viewer, he recognized the importance to his composition of the point soldier. Hoffbauer turned to his favorite model, Bob Campbell, a Richmond resident and former stonemason. Not only did Campbell's distinctive physiognomy give an appropriate prominence to the figure, but his rough features served as well to suggest the common soldier of the Confederate army, whose contribution was a theme assigned to Hoffbauer by the veterans of the Confederate Memorial Association. In a series of small pencil sketches and a large pastel the artist developed a dynamic pose with rifle thrust forward vertically, only to abandon that motif in the finished mural.
3. VHS4SE_140112_083.JPG: The Spring Mural: Jackson and His Infantry The Jackson mural, the first "season," celebrates the early military successes of the Confederacy. Hoffbauer devised an inordinate number of studies for it -- close to two hundred -- because it was one of the initial scenes he developed and because Frederick Sievers's newly sculpted Jackson monument, erected in 1919 only blocks away, received extensive press coverage at the time. The painter was determined to device an image of equal distinction. He conceived at least give major stages as he developed the mural, finally settling on placement of the mounted general at the right. Many of the sketches for this mural were drawn with the aid of clay models, a process recorded in the artist's documentary photographs.
4. VHS4SE_140112_087.JPG: The Winter Murals: An Artillery Scene Through the final "season" of the mural cycle, Hoffbauer's grim treatment of southern defeat was apparently the first painting the artist completed. Because his work was interrupted by service with the French army in World War I, Hoffbauer returned ever mindful of the atrocities of war, which this scene afforded the opportunity to suggest. Using a half dozen rough sketches, close to a hundred small pencil drawings, models of figures and equipment, and more than a dozen large pastels, Hoffbauer laboriously developed his conception through four stages. As the mural progressed, the artist replaced portions of his earliest imagery -- developed simply to suggest military competence -- and looked more and more to convey the dramatic reality of battle. His photographs reveal major revisions.
5. VHS4SE_140112_101.JPG: Sample Studies for the Winter Mural Hoffbauer's development of artillery figures was characteristic of his process through much of the mural cycle, for here he used models and multiple studies. The large pastel displayed above is an early one not even carried to full scale in Hoffbauer's first stage of imagery for this mural. Yet the figure is undeniably strong. It evolved out of small pencil studies, of which a series is exhibited here. Hoffbauer rejected this pose for one even more dramatic, in which the cannon loader twists his body in active movement and lifts his long pole to form a sweeping diagonal that is itself a life on action. That section figure is also visible here in pencil sketches and in Hoffbauer's documentary photography of the first stage of the mural. Both figures -- and their entire crew -- were abandoned in the finished painting for imagery more dramatic and more gruesome.
6. VHS4SE_140112_117.JPG: Clay Models: Though only a means to the end of the finished product of the mural cycle, Hoffbauer's clay models are stunning works of sculpture. Their vigorous and tactile surfaces, animated with light and shadow, are the work of a sensitive artist responsive to his medium in the manner of his famous French and American contemporaries Auguste Rodin and Frederic Remington. The models allowed Hoffbauer to invent and refine compositions. By arranging and rearranging the models, and by looking at these from the low perspective of ground level, the painter could select from seemingly infinite possibilities the most compelling viewpoint from which to stage a scene.
7. VHS4SE_140112_149.JPG: Sample Studies for the Summer Mural For the figure of Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), the most photographed and the most celebrated of the Confederate leaders, the public expected a depiction that would resmble his best-known images. Hoffbauer in fact adapted those -- the bronze equestrian monument in Richmond by Jean Antoine Mercie, the famous Michael Miley photograph of the retired general crowned with an identifying hat and mounted on "Traveller," and wartime photographs such as the one commissioned in the city by sculptor Edward Valentine that show dark eyebrows not yet the gray of Lee's beard. The mystique of Lee, so vividly captured in the striking life photographs by Miley and Mathew Brady, is suggested in Hoffbauer's pastel sketch. Somehow, the effect is diluted in the finished mural. The artist was highly successful, however, in developing through his pencil and pastel studies an impressive figure who appropriately dominates not only this mural but also the entire room.
8. VHS4SE_140112_151.JPG: The Summer Mural: Lee and His Officers The artist's imaginary grouping of more than a dozen of the most illustrious southern commanders, men never together in the field, was conceived as appropriate imagery to mark the middle years of the war, when the Confederacy was at its greatest strength. Although the second "season," this apparently was the third mural painted, the one Hoffbauer conceived after the completion of his laboriously studied Winter and Spring scenes. Its development was reached through four stages and far fewer studies -- small pencil sketches that fill but twenty of the matboards he grouped them on, and half that number of pastels. A few clay models were used. The final stages saw the inclusion of more and more officers, the decision of an advisory committee of the Confederate Memorial Association.
9. VHS4SE_140112_154.JPG: The Autumn Murals: Stuart And His Cavalry Hoffbauer's third "season," and the last mural he painted, revives the later period of the war, when the Confederacy suffered major defeats but enjoyed as well the valor of such figures as JEB Stuart. Exhausted by his previous labors that yielded several hundred preliminary drawings, and harried by Confederate veterans anxious for a finished product to view after a half century of waiting, Hoffbauer evidently produced this mural with speed. Presumably for that reason it has particular freshness and vigor. The artist worked first from clay models alone, highly animated sculptures that were the best he made. Major figures were defined by means of five large pastels. No pencil studies were prepared.
10. VHS4SE_140112_168.JPG: Sample Studies for the Autumn Mural Clay models provided only a starting point for Hoffbauer's spirited figures of galloping cavalry. Photographs of early stages of the mural show the rider at the far right as not only oversized -- too domineering for the composition -- but also gangly and lumbering. He lacks the surety of his clay prototype and is far removed from the end figure of coiled energy in the finished painting. TO develop a dynamic profile, for the end figure, Hoffbauer produced the large pastel drawing displayed above. In this case study, the canvas of the mural had served as the preliminary study after the model and before the pastel. If the canvas of the mural yielded an unduly large study, that sketched served the purpose of development. The final figure has a freshness and boldness that suggest the vitality that animated Stuart's cavalry.
11. VHS4SE_140112_174.JPG: The Artist and the Murals: The Confederate murals were painted between 1913 and 1920 by Charles Hoffbauer (1875-1957), an accomplished French artist and major prize-winner in 1906 at the Paris Salon. A resident of New York City between 1909 and 1912, Hoffbauer enjoyed acclaim there for both his traditional subjects from medieval history and his very different impressionistic scenes of modern city life. Through the 1920s and 1930s, his paintings were recognized at the French salons, and he produced additional murals both there and in the United States. At the end of a long career -- and the end of the mural era -- Hoffbauer was befriended by Walt Disney and entered the American motion picture industry as a technical adviser and artist. The Confederate murals were the principal accomplishment of his career, the project that inspired magnificent imagery from this former classmate of Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. Hoffbauer was commissioned to paint the Richmond murals by the Confederate Memorial Association, a veterans' organization that in 1946 merged with the Virginia Historical Society. Following the theme "The Four Seasons of the Confederacy," the cycle equates seasons of the year with the passage of time. Beginning on the left (east) wall, the large murals progress through the seasons of spring to winter, from the opening years of the war to its close. Hoffbauer's paintings ennobled the Confederate experience. Their creation and veneration were part of a resurgent southern nationalism -- the so-called "cult of the Lost Cause " -- whose enthusiasts were determined that the region's past be interpreted in a manner to reinforce the present social order of the South and inspire the future.
12. VHS4SE_140112_182.JPG: Making the Murals Studies by Charles Hoffbauer
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Description of Subject Matter: Version through 2021:
Four Seasons of the Confederacy: Murals by Charles Hoffbauer
French mural artist Charles Hoffbauer was commissioned by the Confederate Memorial Association in 1914 to paint a series of Civil War murals for the newly constructed Battle Abbey. With the outbreak of World War I, he interrupted his labors and returned to France, leaving his project half completed. He came back after the war only to obliterate his earlier work, explaining that his front-line experiences had radically changed his view of war. The murals were unveiled in January 1921. Today, his work stands untouched. The murals follow the changing seasons and include the Spring Mural, the Summer Mural, the Autumn Mural, and the Winter Mural.
* The Spring Mural depicts Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson reviewing his troops in the Shenandoah Valley.
* The Summer Mural portrays a fictitious gathering of Confederate commanders.
* The Autumn Mural shows J. E. B. Stuart leading his cavalrymen on a foray through Virginia woods.
* The Winter Mural illustrates the misery of an artillery battery in retreat through the snow, its equipment shattered, its men on the verge of exhaustion.

Version Effective in 2022:
The Lost Cause: Myths, Monuments, & Murals
From May 14, 2022
This exhibition explores the history of the Lost Cause as expressed through a cycle of military murals and a sculpture of Robert E. Lee previously on view at the U.S. Capitol.
Square feet: 1,547
Number of artifacts: 4 murals, 1 sculpture
About the Exhibition: The Lost Cause was a widespread effort by former Confederates after the American Civil War (1861–1865) to justify and glorify the Confederacy. The Lost Cause manifested in different ways over many generations—from history textbooks to street names to various forms of memorialization. As with most of their counterparts, the monument and murals displayed in this gallery, as well as the gallery itself, tell us more about the intentions and values of the people who created them than about the historical subjects they depict.
About the Artifacts:
* Commissioned by the Confederate Memorial Association and executed by Charles Hoffbauer, the Confederate Memorial Military Murals were unveiled at the Confederate Memorial Institute in 1921. The Virginia Historical Society acquired them when it acquired the CMA in 1946 as its new home. The murals have remained on exhibit in the south wing of the former CMI building until the present time.
* The Edward Valentine sculpture of Lee stood as one of Virginia’s entries in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the U.S. Capitol from 1909 until 2020, when it was given to the VMHC by the Commonwealth of Virginia.
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