No. 12792 Charles Ellery Stedman
Stedman was a sketch artist who lived at 6 Monadnock Street and had a medical office there. The illustrations on view in this exhibit were published in The Civil War Sketchbook of Charles Ellery Stedman Surgeon, United States Navy. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1976.
His humourous nature is evident in his work. A navy surgeon during the Civil War, Charles Stedman remains well known amongst collectors of Civil War memorabilia for his pencil.
The following is from Project Muse https://muse.jhu.edu/article/419526/pdf
The artist whose life and work are this book’s subject was a Massachusetts physician turned naval surgeon. He did sea duty from 1862 to 1865 on a steam corvette and on a monitor, blockading and supporting invasions of the South’s Atlantic coast. Finally he was on a supply ship which plied both Atlantic and Gulf waters. An amateur artist who had already published a volume of lithographs satirizing yachting, Stedman sketched during the war and subsequently drew a set of finished illustrations for the library of the Bay State’s Military Order of the Loyal Legion. These plates and a selection from Stedman’s other art appear in this book. The work also contains a biography of Stedman, stressing the war years, which relates the pictures to his career and explains their content. While unfootnoted, the biography is solidly based on family letters, naval records and published sources.
No. 12761 Blockaded, an illustration from Stedman’s Civil War Sketchbook
The authoritative discussion of nautical matters lives up to the author’s reputation in that field. Unfortunately, he has also included too much else. The book is like an overloaded small craft. She is weighed down by an excess of conjectural “must have beens” and similar speculative extrapolations. A deck cargo of peripheral history burdens her yet civil war history more. Indeed, an unnecessary, misleading reference to the John Brown Raid pushes her down to the Plimsoll mark warning of scholarly peril. Yet the pictures keep afloat this attractive model of the printer’s craft. The publisher has carefully reproduced the original size and tint of the fifty-two major plates. From them, the reader obtains rare glimpses of the Civil War navy. All of Stedman’s illustrations have merit but those of experiences aboard an ironclad monitor are especially significant. As Hill indicates, Stedman is sometimes inaccurate or uninterested regarding technical details. The artist is, however, always at his best in depicting humans and their foibles. Not content with scenes of military action, he smiles wryly at himself lying seasick in his cabin and at his fellows lined up for the last issue of rum in the United States Navy. Stedman’s work will reward careful examination by those interested in the Civil War, of course, but also by students of navies, of medicine and of social history.
See The Civil War Sketchbook of Charles Ellery Stedman Surgeon, United States Navy. San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1976.