WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Portrait Gallery continues to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, with rotating exhibitions, many of which draw heavily on the museum’s permanent collection. These presentations, which mark each year of the war, complement the installation of objects from the Civil War that are on long-term display in the exhibition “American Origins.”

In addition, the building that houses the museum at Eighth and F streets N.W., served as a Civil War barracks and hospital to Union soldiers and hosted Lincoln’s second inaugural ball March 6, 1865, as the war was nearing its conclusion.

The Confederate Sketches of Adalbert Volck
March 30, 2012, through Jan. 21, 2013
Having come to the United States in 1848 in the wave of immigration from Germany after its failed revolution, Adalbert Volck settled in Baltimore. Unusual for the politically liberal German émigrés, Volck sided with the Confederacy. A dentist by trade, he served the southern cause in several ways, including smuggling medical supplies to Virginia across the Potomac. However, Volck’s most significant contribution to the Confederate cause was his production of pictorial propaganda that vilified President Abraham Lincoln, northern abolitionists and Union soldiers. While his major publication, Sketches from the Civil War in North America, had a small circulation, the etchings reveal the Confederate mindset and contemporary southern opinion. NPG curator: historian James Barber.

Mathew Brady’s Photographs of Union Generals
March 30, 2012, through May 31, 2015
Although Mathew Brady may be best known for his photographic documentation of the Civil War, his New York and Washington galleries also did a brisk business throughout the conflict by producing studio portraits of the ever-changing roster of Union army generals. Featuring modern albumen prints made from the original Brady negatives in the National Portrait Gallery’s Frederick Hill Meserve Collection, this installation will include portraits of many of the North’s military leaders, from

George McClellan and Ambrose Burnside to William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses Grant. NPG curator: curator of photographs Ann Shumard.