The National Portrait Gallery's Warren Perry discusses an 1866 painting of William Tecumseh Sherman by George Peter Alexander Healy.

 

"War is war and not popularity-seeking." With these words to his Confederate opponent at Atlanta, General William T. Sherman suggested the attitude that made him both a successful commander and a bitterly hated figure in the South. He stripped war of glory and chivalry. His destructive march through Georgia and his later campaign in the Carolinas dismantled the economic base of the Confederacy and shattered the morale of its citizens. His methods anticipated twentieth-century "total war."

 

Influenced perhaps by Sherman's reputation for severe tactics in the field, artist G. P. A. Healy once noted that he found the Union general a forbidding portrait subject at first. But as the posing progressed, he found the general quite friendly.

 

Filmed at NPG, February 2014.