Sprague's Brigade Saves the Wagon Trains of the Army,
1864
Theodore Russell Davis
(1840-1894)
View Artist Bio
Pen and in on paper
4 1/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Status: Available
Theodore Russell Davis was born in Boston in 1840. As a boy he was taken to Washington, D.C., where he graduated from Rittenhouse Academy. At fifteen he moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he received art instruction from Henry W. Herrick and from James Walker, a Mexican War veteran later known for his Civil War panoramas.
In 1861 Davis became a "special artist" for Harper's Weekly magazine. The day after the attack on Fort Sumter Davis left Baltimore for the South in the party of British war correspondent William Howard Russell. Mistrusted as a spy, Davis was threatened by vigilantes, but he nevertheless managed to visit and sketch Fortress Monroe, Virginia; Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, Savannah, Montgomery, Pensacola and New Orleans. He left Russell's party at Memphis and returned to the East. His first drawings appeared as wood engravings in Harper's Weekly in May, 1861.
Throughout the war Davis shuttled back and forth between the eastern and western theatres in the company of Union armies. He was the most traveled and the third most prolific of the thirty or so "specials" working for various publications. He produced 252 drawings, all for Harper's Weekly. In 1867 that publication recalled that Davis had,
". . . witnessed the capture of Port Royal; the battle between the Monitor and Merrimac; the conflict at Shiloh; the capture of Corinth; the first bombardment of Vicksburg; the seizure of Morris Island; the battle of Chickamauga; the siege and battle of Chattanooga; the "Atlanta campaign and the Grand March to the sea, and thence through the Carolinas."
Davis suffered the privations of a private soldier, and much of the danger too. He was wounded and once held off at gunpoint a surgeon who wanted to amputate his leg. Years later he recalled that,
"There have been occasions when some industrious sharp-shooter troubled me by too personal direction of his bullets ....My most peculiar experience of this sort was having a sketch book shot out of my hand and sent whirling over my shoulder. At another time, one chilly night after the day of a hard battle, as I lay shivering on the ground with a single blanket over me, a forlorn soldier begged and received a share of the blanket. I awoke at daybreak to find the soldier dead, and from the wound it was plain that but for the intervention of his head, the bullet would have gone through my own."
Major Henry Hitchcock of Sherman's staff wrote in his diary, "I write in my tent, sitting on the gound, book on campstool, candle on my valise....T. R. Davis is finishing his sketches of Madison, Georgia, for Harper's Weekly, sitting on t'other side of the valise, by the same candle." Hitchcock wrote his wife, "You must take ‘Harper's Weekly’ now. Their special artist, Theo. R. Davis, has been with us all the time.... His sketches are good and truthful."
Davis adventures did not end with the Civil War. In October, 1865, he was sent to the West. He left Atchison, Kansas, on November 17, heading for Denver by Butterfield Overland Despatch. On the fifth day he ". . . saw a band of Indians charging on the coach, less than sixty yards distant. Mr. D, the moment that he gave the alarm, picked up his rifle and sent its contents at the most gaudily gotten up Indian, who, not liking the dose, ran off. One of the Indians had charged the stock herder, driving arrows at him meanwhile, when Mr. Davis sent the interior arrangements of his Ballard rifle into Mr. Indian's back...
After fifteen days Davis arrived in Denver, where he stayed until February, 1866. He then traveled to Louisiana and Texas, where, with special artist Alfred Waud, he sketched the after effects of the Civil War. In the spring of 1867 he joined General Hancock's expedition against the Indians in Nebraska and Colorado, staying when Custer took command, but leaving when the campaign seemed a failure. He had been in the saddle four months and had ridden three thousand miles.
In 1879 Thomas Haviland asked Davis to plan the decoration of a new White House state dinner service ordered by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes. Davis decided to depict American flora and fauna. At a studio in Asbury Park, New Jersey, which he had converted from a bathhouse, Davis painted sixty watercolors based on the specimens of fish, birds, animals, and plants which he kept in an adjoining room. The result was the most distinctly American of White House dinner services. A few years later Davis was a consultant on the Missionary Ridge and Atlanta cyclorama paintings.
In 1884 Davis left Harper's Weekly after twenty-three years and became a free-lance illustrator. In 1889 he wrote "How a Battle is Sketched" for St. Nicholas, a young people's magazine published by the magazine Century. He was active in providing illustrations for Century's series, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, which also appeared in four hardcover volumes. His drawing Sprague's Brigade Saves the Wagon Train of the Army, depicting an incident at Decatur in Sherman's Atlanta campaign, appeared in volume four on page 314. It was listed as "From a sketch made at the time." American Heritage Publishing Company owns the drawing which was engraved in Battles and Leaders, so this drawing either is a duplicate or perhaps Davis' original Civil War sketch.
Union Troops Burning Out the Shenandoah Valley was not published in Battles and Leaders, but appeared in St. Nicholas in June, 1887. American Heritage has the pen-and-wash version engraved in St. Nicholas, so this pen-and-ink version is a duplicate or an earlier work. That it was drawn during the war is supported by the inscription "haste!!!" at the lower right.
Davis died of Bright's disease at Asbury Park on November 10, 1894. He was only fifty-four, but he had witnessed and recorded many of the most famous events in American history.
THE SOUTH ON PAPER: LINE, COLOR AND LIGHT, Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc., Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1985, pp. 33,34.
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