The Bloody Angle

Wyeth intended The Bloody Angle to evoke the general horror of war and specifically to depict a crucial part of the Battle of Spotsylvania, Virginia (1864). Johnston’s text is powerful. "Then the storm broke, she wrote, "and the angle became the spot on earth where, it is estimated, in all the history of the earth the musketry fire was the heaviest. It became The Bloody Angle."

Wyeth compressed both blue and gray soldiers into the lower two thirds of the picture, with the figures in the chaos of battle rising to a compositional angle symbolizing an horrific apex in the history of the war and of the country. He admitted to Mary Johnston that the composition was also constructed with Houghton Mifflin’s advertising department in mind, feeling it would make an effective design for an advertising poster.