Nathaniel P. Banks, Engraved: A Portrait Plate from the Civil War
A full-length engraved portrait of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks in uniform, published by Johnson, Fry & Co. of New York in 1863 from a painting by Alonzo Chappel, with his facsimile signature beneath.
TranscriptionThe portrait
Painted by Alonzo Chappel. Nathl P. Banks [facsimile signature] Likeness from a recent Photograph from life Johnson, Fry & Co. Publishers, New York. Entered according to act of Congress A.D 1863 by Johnson, Fry & Co. in the clerks office of the district court for the southern district of NY.
The story on the paper
This is an engraved portrait plate, the Civil War's equivalent of a movie poster, and the sitter is Banks himself: the facsimile signature below the image reads "Nathl P. Banks." The general stands at ease in full uniform, sword in hand, his forage cap resting on the table beside him. Johnson, Fry & Co. of New York issued the plate in 1863, with the image credited as "a recent Photograph from life" and the painting to Alonzo Chappel, a Brooklyn artist who built a career on portraits of the Revolution and the Civil War.
Johnson, Fry & Co. was one of the great publishers of engraved portraits in nineteenth-century America. Their portrait galleries, thick books of plates with biographical text, hung open in parlors and schoolrooms, and a plate like this one carries the wide paper margins of a leaf bound into such a volume. In 1863 Banks was one of the most photographed faces in the Union: a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, three times Governor of Massachusetts, and then Major General commanding the Department of the Gulf at New Orleans.
The portrait flatters him, as portrait plates were meant to. Banks's military reputation would suffer in Louisiana, especially after the Red River Campaign of 1864, but his political career never slowed: after the war he served again in Congress, where he was one of the House managers of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson.
The people named in it
Nathaniel P. Banks (1816-1894)
Waltham bobbin boy turned Speaker of the House, Governor of Massachusetts, and Major General of volunteers. In 1863, the year this portrait was published, he was commanding the Union's Department of the Gulf from New Orleans.
Alonzo Chappel (1828-1887)
Brooklyn painter and illustrator whose historical and Civil War portraits and scenes were widely engraved for popular publications.
- Type
- Wood-engraved portrait (book plate)
- Date
- 1863
- Place
- New York, New York