Sketch for the Surrender of General Lee to General Grant at Appomatox

On 9 April 1865, in the house of Wilmer McLean in the Virginia village of Appomattox Court House, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to General Ulysses S. Grant, and the Civil War was all but over. Somewhere between 1875 and 1880 Eakins began to plan a painting of that afternoon, and this small oil sketch is most of what survives of the plan. It used to show both men. The canvas was later cut in two, probably by Charles Bregler, a former pupil who looked after Eakins's studio, and the half with Lee belonged to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington until 2011, when it was sold at auction. Boston has Grant, writing out the terms, laid in with quick, broad strokes and hardly any detail. Eakins wanted first-hand evidence for everything he painted, and witnesses were struck by how different the two generals looked. Horace Porter, an officer on Grant's staff, described Grant in an ordinary pair of boots, with no sword and only his shoulder straps to show his rank, and Lee in a new grey uniform buttoned to the throat, with a jewelled sword at his side. The painting was never finished. The Eakins scholar Kathleen Foster has suggested he could not face painting at least one of the two men from photographs. In 1892 he did come back to Grant, modelling the horses for bronze figures of Grant and Lincoln on the Soldiers' and Sailors' Arch in Brooklyn, while the sculptor William O'Donovan made the riders.