Peter Gaumgras: Artist (1827-1904)

By Chelsea DeLay

I. Biography
II. Chronology
III. Collections
IV. Exhibitions
V. Memberships
VI. Suggested Resources
VII. Notes

I. Biography

Born January 4, 1827, in the small town of Hamburg, Peter Baumgras was a German-born artist who later became known for his portrait and still life paintings. Baumgras first studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, and then went on to enroll at the Munich Royal Academy where he worked closely with Freidrich Kaulbach and Karl Schorn.[1] In 1853, shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, Baumgras immigrated to the United States, settling in Syracuse, New York.

Peter Baumgras’ career as an artist launched shortly after his marriage to Mary Thomson in 1856, when the couple decided to move to Washington, D.C. Shortly after the onset of the Civil War, Baumgras enlisted in the Union Army, where he initially served as a surgical draftsman, then went on to assume the position of Assistant Professor of Drawing at the United States Naval Academy.[2] His involvement in several social clubs connected Braumgras with the most important members of Washington’s art world; he was invited to join the Literary Society of Washington and the Society of Washington Artists, and in 1859 was asked to exhibit at the Washington Art Association. The level of skill and magnificent coloring demonstrated in his still life paintings garnered the attention of the faculty at both the Columbian College (now George Washington University) and Gallaudet University, resulting in brief tenures at each institution as the resident Professor of Art.

Baumgras spent a short time in California during the early 1870s, which distinctly impacted his artistic style; Yosemite Valley (1879), his largest landscape painting, and Bighorn Sheep (1875) depict western landscapes infused with brightened colors and light. In 1877, Baumgras revisited Washington, D.C., where he once again participated in the growing art scene by contributing to the creation of the Washington Arts Club, which was founded with the intent to cultivate the fine arts and promote social interaction among its members.[3]

In 1877, Baumgras relocated permanently to Chicago, where he remained active for several years. As a faculty member at the University of Illinois he taught drawing until 1879. He also enjoyed success at the Chicago Interstate Industrial Exposition, were his works were exhibited in 1885 and 1887.[4] Upon his return to Washington in 1900, Baumgras submitted himself to be considered for a curatorial position at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and justified his qualification by his wide range of experience and interaction with the “history of art and the leading artists of the past half-century of this country and art abroad.”[5]

The final years of Peter Baumgras’ life were spent in Chicago, where he passed away in 1904.

II. Chronology

1827 Born January 4 in Hamburg, Bavaria, Germany
1844–46 Studies at Düsseldorf Academy
1847–52 Studies at Munich Royal Academy, under Freidrich Kaulbach and Karl Schorn
1853 Immigrates to Syracuse, NY
1856 Marries Mary Thompson
1857 Moves to Washington, DC
Serves as surgical draftsman of Union Army
Assistant Professor of Drawing at US Naval Academy
Professor of Art at Columbian University (now George Washington University) and at Gallaudet University
1871–75 Travels to California, where he is employed as an artist by Louis Agassiz
1877 Founding member of The Washington Art Club and serves on the Executive Board
1877 Settles in Chicago, Illinois
Hired as Professor of Art at University of Illinois
1900 Applies for the Curatorship of the Corcoran Gallery
1904 Passes away in Chicago

III. Collections

Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C.
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Lincoln Museum at Ford's Theater, Washington, D.C.
McLellan Lincoln Collection of Brown University, RI
New Haven Colony Historical Society, CT
New-York Historical Society, NY
Oakland Museum, CA

VI. Exhibitions

1859–60 Washington Art Association
1868 National Academy of Design
1872, 1877 San Francisco
1897, 1898, 1900 Art Institute of Chicago
1898 Boston Art Club
1983 National Museum of American Art

V. Memberships

1877 Washington Art Club (founding member)
1901–1903 Society of Washington Artists
The Literary Society of Washington

VI. Suggested Resources

Cosentino, Andrew. The Capitol Image: Painters In Washington 1800-1915. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983.
Pratt, Waldo S. A Forgotten American Portrait Painter: Peter Baumgras 1827–1904. Hartford, Connecticut: Privately printed, 1937.

VII. Notes

1. Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art: Artists Active between 1898 and 1947 (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999), 239.
2. Andrew Cosentino, The Capitol Image: Painters In Washington 1800-1915 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 252.
3. Art Life In Washington: Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. vol. 24 (Washington, D.C.: Historical Society of Washington, D.C., 1992), 174. March 26, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40067164
4. Kirsten M. Jensen, The American Salon: The Art Gallery at the Chicago Interstate Industrial Exposition, 1873–1890 (New York: City University of New York, 2007), 442.
5. Cosentino, 92.

IMAGE: Baumgras completed this watercolor while Tucker's wound was healing

FROM: questroyalfineart.com

Learn more about Civil War medical illustrators and artists at www.CivilWarRx.com.

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Herman Faber, Artist and Medical Illustrator

From: findagrave.com

Birth: 1831, Germany
Death: Dec. 10, 1913
Philadelphia
Philadelphia County
Pennsylvania, USA

NOTE: I used the birth information which is on his Death Certificate. Other sources give January 26, 1832.

He died at home: 648 Chelten Avenue

Buried on December 13, 1913.

His parents were Ludwig Faber & Mary Goss.

His first name often appears as Hermann.

Famous artist. He is considered a founder of medical illustration in America. During the Civil War, he did many illustrations for the U.S. Army's 6-volume "Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion".

His most famous single work is his pencil drawing of President Lincoln's deathbed. Known for its accuracy, he was an eyewitness & did it on-site.

He was also a noted etcher of animals.

Article on his death: "New York Times", December 12, 1913 - Page 11

Family links:
 Children:
  Ludwig Ernest Faber (1855 - 1913)*

*Calculated relationship

Burial:
Woodlands Cemetery
Philadelphia
Philadelphia County
Pennsylvania, USA
Plot: N 1155

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Drawing on History: A Civil War Cartoon

Hermann Faber: Medical Illustrator

By Tom Heintjes, 5-9-12

"Just as hammering one nail doesn’t make one a carpenter, so the old joke goes, neither does drawing one cartoon qualify one as a cartoonist. Hermann Faber without a doubt would not have considered himself a cartoonist, as he is now acknowledged as one of the founders of the medical-illustration profession. But the sole cartoon he produced, and later re-created, came during and as a result of American’s bloodiest period, the Civil War."
-Michael Rhode

In April 1862, Dr. William Hammond had been appointed the Union Army’s surgeon general after his predecessor, Dr. Thomas Lawson, resigned over differences with the autocratic Secretary of War Edwin M.  Stanton. Lawson had held the post since 1836, and his deputy, Dr. Clement Finley, filled in for less than a year before Hammond’s appointment. Neither man had remotely prepared the Army’s medical corps for the coming war. In May 1862 Hammond founded the Army Medical Museum, and that August he appointed Dr. John Brinton, a surgeon, as the museum’s curator and Joseph Woodward as Brinton’s assistant.

Brinton and Hammond shared a trait: They were inexhaustible in the search for improved medical knowledge. To that end, Brinton undertook the grisly but scientifically rewarding task of scouring the battlefields for specimens. (In a war that cost more than 550,000 lives, finding them was unfortunately not a problem.) He and Woodward compiled the information into the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, with Brinton writing the surgical material while Woodward produced the medical and disease sections. When they finished the work in the late 1880s, their research sprawled over six volumes and more than 6,000 pages. Once he began work on his section of the History, Brinton hired a staff of artists, enlisting them as hospital stewards and assigning them to military duty in the surgeon general’s office. In this capacity Hermann Faber joined the museum’s staff and produced many illustrations for the museum, mostly for Woodward’s medical section of the History.

Faber’s path to Washington, D.C., was a long and indirect one: Born in Germany on January 26, 1832, he studied illustration at the University of Giessen and emigrated to Philadelphia, where he married in 1853. He supported his family by producing anatomical illustrations until he joined Brinton and the museum in 1863.

In 1864 Brinton was abruptly relieved of his duties at the museum. Despite his medical qualifications, politics played a role in his dismissal, with several factors against him: He was a Hammond appointee, and Hammond had been court-martialed over purchasing Army blankets outside the usual channels (Stanton’s dislike of him didn’t help his case); he was a cousin of George McClellan (the discredited Union general and failed presidential candidate); and he was the proponent of a controversial and unpopular plan to retain volunteer surgeons equal in rank to the career Army surgeons after war’s end.

Faber’s sole cartoon concerned Brinton’s reassignment to normal medical duties. In his autobiography, Brinton recalls the circumstances surrounding the cartoon’s elements:

"I had been a long time in Washington, and had many friends. To some of these, I said good-bye, and to one of them, Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas, I sent a picture. I had often joked with her when officers had been sent away from Washington under the displeasure of the Secretary of War,—exiled, in fact, for the Secretary looked upon a detail to Louisville or St. Louis as a banishment, quite as in Russia they regard banishment to Siberia. Some officers took removal from Washington as a rather hard fate, but I had often told Mrs. Douglas that I was sure to be decapitated, but that when it came, like St. Denis (she, Mrs. Douglas, was a Catholic), I would lose my head with good grace. So I requested one of the artists of the Museum, Faber, a German of facile pencil, to make a pen-and-ink sketch of myself as St. Denis leaving the Museum, head in hand, for the region of the setting sun, with the bloody headman’s sword, the unfinished work of the Surgical History of the War, etc."

Brinton bestowed Faber’s resulting cartoon on Mrs. Douglas as a gift (no one knows if the original yet exists). The cartoon that today’s historian can view—the one accompanying this article—is Faber’s own re-creation of his first effort. Brinton recalled in his autobiography that Dr. Joseph K. Barnes, the new surgeon general, had heard of Faber’s cartoon and asked to see it. Woodward persuaded Faber to redraw it from memory. According to Brinton, he sensed the classically versed Woodward’s involvement in the motto Si tacuisses Philosophe mansisses (from Dante’s Inferno): “O if you had been silent, you would have then remained a philosopher.”

Barnes gave Faber’s second original to Secretary Stanton and, like its predecessor, its whereabouts are unknown.

Faber produced one other drawing of historical significance: a pencil drawing of President Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed. Lincoln had lain unconscious for several hours, and eventually died, in a boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theatre, where John Wilkes Booth assassinated him. Faber was brought into the room to sketch it immediately after Lincoln’s body had been removed. Barnes was among the doctors attending Lincoln after he was shot, and he approved Faber’s drawing for its accuracy. Of all the versions of Lincoln’s deathbed, Faber was the only one drawing from the scene. Like his St. Denis cartoon, Faber produced a second version of this work that now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Because of his military service, Faber was granted American citizenship on October 31, 1868. By then, he had returned to Philadelphia and resumed his career as a medical illustrator, and he instructed two of his sons in the trade. In his twilight yearshe taught medical illustration. According to one of his colleagues,the etcher J.L.G. Ferris, Faber spent these years contentedly. “He was a master of the classical line and had considerable erudition,” he said. “Affable and kindly, he was always ready to give advice to the student. He had short shrift, however, for the lazy or insincere worker.”

Toward the end of Faber’s life, America had begun to put the Civil War behind herself and began assuming a less provincial and more global perspective. When Faber died on December 10, 1913, the United States stood at the precipice of a war with Germany—Faber’s homeland.

The isolated nonmedical illustrations Faber produced were the result of great national traumas: the United States tearing itself apart and its president being slain. Though history has largely overlooked Faber, his artwork is an interesting stitch in the fabric of American history.

From: cartoonician.com

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Lucius M. Sargent, Surgeon and Medical Artist

From: collections.countway.harvard.edu

Lucius M. Sargent, an 1857 graduate of Harvard Medical School, was an accomplished draughtsman and was appointed the first artist of the Massachusetts General Hospital.  At the beginning of the war, he became a surgeon with the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteers, then joined the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry in October, 1861, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Image 2: "Camp near Falmouth, Va", by Lucius M. Sargent. From the Library of Harvard Medical School.
This drawing, from 1863, is part of a letter to Sargent’s young son, George; he wrote, “I shall try and get leave to come home one of these days.  I hope you will be glad to see me when I come.  If you are not glad, I shall be very sorry, I can tell you.  I have not got anything to love here.  All that I’ve got to love in this world is in Jamaica Plains.”

"It's too late, Dr., ye are", by Lucius M. Sargent. From the Library of Harvard Medical School.
This obstetrical scene is dated November 30, 1864.  Dr. S. W. Abbott, a former surgeon with the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, stated in 1893 that Sargent drew this “while in camp in front of Petersburg …. Nine days afterward he was killed by a Confederate shell while in command of his regiment in an action near Bellfield, Va.”

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