Beautiful and inspiring, the Memorial Military Murals were commissioned by the Confederate Memorial Association and painted by French artist Charles Hoffbauer between 1913 and 1920. For nearly a century, they were referred to as "The Four Seasons of the Confederacy," but recent research suggests that the artist intended each to be a tribute to the major branches of Confederate military service.
Hoffbauer left in the middle of his work to fight for his native France in World War I. When he returned, a weary soldier who now knew the horrors of the trench, he altered his plans for the murals to depict the more violent, bloody reality of war.
With the exception of the cycloramas at Gettysburg and Grant Park in Atlanta, there are few large-scale pieces of Civil War artwork on public view. Their scale alone would make them important pieces, but their content and context are even more important.
In 2011, the Virginia Historical Society began conservation work on the Memorial Military Murals with funding received from Save America's Treasures, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Important cleaning and conservation work began in June 2011 and was completed in June 2014. Additional work to renovate the gallery space began in June 2014 and was completed in May 2015.
Cleo Mullins of Richmond Conservation Studio served as chief conservator on the project. Mullins graduated from Cooperstown Graduate Programs, State University of New York at Oneonta, Program of the Conservation of Historical and Artistic Works in 1974. She holds a Certificate of Advanced Study in addition to her masters from Cooperstown. She served as Intern/Fellow in the conservation laboratory of the National Museum of American Art (then the National Collection of Fine Arts) at the Smithsonian in 1973–1974.
Visit the Virginia Museum of History & Culture to view the splendor of these murals in person.
More about Hoffbauer and his murals
Charles Hoffbauer was born in Paris in 1875. He studied under the most famous French artists of the day and achieved widespread recognition for his work, even before his commission from the Confederate Memorial Association. The murals at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture are considered his crowning achievements. In 1941, he escaped occupied France and became an American citizen. He settled first in California, where he worked as an animator for Walt Disney Studios, and then moved to Massachusetts, where he remained until his death in 1957.
A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Hoffbauer was thoroughly versed in French academic procedures of painting large-scale themes of grandeur and historical importance. In preparing the Memorial Military Murals, he used a full repertoire of those techniques.
Unable to view events fifty years in the past, Hoffbauer by necessity invented the scenes of his murals. His production of imagery was a gradual process. One means by which the artist developed initial ideas of composition was the small ink and watercolor sketch.
No less effective a device in the first stages of development were clay and wood models, which allowed Hoffbauer to invent and refine compositions.
Literally dozens of very small ink and pencil sketches (arranged on matboard by the artist) were a means to develop precise details of imagery. The small sketches were tested on a large scale in some sixty crayon and pastel drawings.
Most of the pastels, like most of the small drawings, are rendered on grids, which routinely were used as a means to enlarge and transfer figures from a small to a large scale. In that process, the detail in each small square of a grid is repeated in the corresponding square of a larger grid.
Though only a means to the end of the finished product of the mural cycle, Hoffbauer's clay models are stunning works of sculpture. Their vigorous and tactile surfaces, animated with light and shadow, are the work of a sensitive artist responsive to his medium in the manner of his famous French and American contemporaries Auguste Rodin and Frederic Remington. The models allowed Hoffbauer to invent and refine compositions. By arranging and rearranging the models, and by looking at these from the low perspective of ground level, the painter could select from seemingly infinite possibilities the most compelling viewpoint from which to stage a scene.
Hoffbauer's models, sketches, and photographs are in the collections of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
For more insights into Hoffbauer's life, read our blog article, "The Man Behind the Murals."