An excellent condition convex glass (“bubble glass”) frame measuring 14-1/2 X 16-1/4 inches with brownish-black plaster and wood moulding having a gilt raised inner ridge, and containing a small wicker basket mounted to the inner back panel holding dried, cut wildflowers, all surrounded by an oval mat with thick and thin gilt border lines. Printed on the backing underneath the basket in black script and Old English lettering is, “From the Field of / The Battle of Gettysburg / Fought July 1^st to 4^th 1863.”  The frame has been repaired and has missing plaster elements.

This piece was displayed at the Battlefield Military Museum on Baltimore Pike until its recent closure.  These framed baskets of dried flowers mounted under glass are among the earliest Gettysburg souvenirs ever made.  According to The Gettysburg Museum of History these shadow boxes were sold in the fall of 1863 by the U.S. Sanitary Commission to raise money for wounded and sick soldiers.

Similar floral, memorial arrangements are sometimes associated with wartime “sanitary fairs” held under the auspices of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and others that functioned to raise money for wounded, sick, and invalid soldiers, their widows and orphans, but these arrangements also would have had a wider, more general, sentimental appeal, not only as connections to battlefields where friends and loved ones may have shed their blood, but as more general commentary on man’s connection with nature, his destructive powers and perhaps some hint of its regenerative abilities or at least its eventual ability to conceal his destructiveness. Of course, they would also perhaps be more acceptable for display in a home rather than purely military relics gathered on the battlefield, though one cannot help but think of Matthew Brady’s photographs on Culp’s Hill, or even later battlefield photographs, where the bullet and shell-struck trees take center stage, not to mention photographs of the overgrown battlefields of 1864 with the ungathered, forgotten bones of the slain lying barely concealed by the underbrush.

This is a very scarce example in excellent condition, solid, with good color and surface to the moulding of the oval frame. It remains not just a battlefield souvenir, but an evocative memorial piece.    [sr/dm][ph:L]

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