Stories From The Stacks

Eva McGraw (Ph.D. candidate in art history at CUNY) discusses her research on the Civil War naval art of Xanthus Smith. Smith painted naval engagements of the Civil War and during the war he was a sailor and the personal secretary of Samuel Francis du Pont. Smith tried to make his naval engagement paintings as accurate as possible, he did this by corresponding with the officers of the ships that he painted. Many of his works featured then new ironclad ships.