One of six mural-size paintings of Minnesota’s Civil War regiments that hang in the Governor’s Suite of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul.

Paper size 28 x 22 in., image size 21 x 16.

The Fifth, Seventh, Ninth, and Tenth Minnesota Regiments all fought in the deadly charge across a muddy cornfield at Shy’s Hill near Nashville, Tennessee, in December 1864. More than three hundred Minnesota soldiers were left on the field of battle, losses which Howard Pyle’s painting commemorates in its face-to-face depcition of the hazards of war. Howard Pyle (1853-1911) was an artist of great popularity who wrote two dozen books and illustrated more than a hundred others. Known as the “Father of American Illustration,” Pyle taught his brand of carefully research yet dramatically composed historical art to a generation of American Painters. This painting is in the Minnesota Historical Society Collections. Interpretation of the painting by Thomas O’Sullivan, Curator of Art, Minnesota Historical Society, 1994.