CIRCA 1880S-1890S ALBUMEN RE-PRINT OF TIMOTHY H. O’SULLIVAN’S “HARVEST OF DEATH” – UNION DEAD ON THE FIELD AT GETTYSBURG

CIRCA 1880S-1890S ALBUMEN RE-PRINT OF TIMOTHY H. O’SULLIVAN’S “HARVEST OF DEATH” – UNION DEAD ON THE FIELD AT GETTYSBURG

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$2,250.00

Quantity Available: 1

Item Code: 1320-16

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A haunting period photographic reprint of one of the most iconic and historically significant images of the American Civil War — Timothy H. O'Sullivan's "A Harvest of Death," depicting the Union dead on the field of Gettysburg. The original image, taken in early July 1863 in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, is one of the most famous landscape photographs of the war, published as Plate 36 in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866). Timothy O'Sullivan made the photograph with a wet plate collodion negative, and Alexander Gardner printed the albumen photograph, titled it, and provided the accompanying text.

This particular example is a later commercial albumen reprint, produced circa the late 1880s or 1890s and sold by a San Francisco dealer at 942½ Harrison Street, who offered copies postpaid for one dollar. The printed text mounted below the image is itself a fascinating historical artifact, candidly noting that the original negative — then "over 25 years" old — had been "deteriorating steadily" and describing these as original "War Views" taken by the "Special Government Photographers, M.B. Brady and Alex. Gardner." This dealer's broadside text is characteristic of the late-19th-century commercial trade in Civil War imagery and offers genuine insight into how these images were marketed to a public still hungry for relics of the war a generation later.

The image remains powerful and historically resonant: each photograph in Gardner's series carried a lengthy caption, and for the "Harvest of Death" the text read that such a picture conveys a useful moral, showing the blank horror and reality of war in opposition to its pageantry.

Presented in a triple-line archival mat and housed in a handsome hardwood frame under glass.

After: Timothy H. O'Sullivan (negative) / Alexander Gardner (original positive)

Image: "A Harvest of Death," Field of Gettysburg, Union Dead Original negative date: July 1863 This example: Later albumen reprint, circa 1880s–1890s, San Francisco dealer issue

Medium: Albumen photographic reprint with original printed descriptive text Framed dimensions: 15 × 16 inches

Condition: Fair to good; image faded/lightened with age, as noted in the period text itself; toning and handling consistent with age

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