Cemetery Ridge, 1863

At about one o'clock on July 3, 1863, some 150 Confederate guns opened on the center of the Union line along Cemetery Ridge. It went on for nearly two hours. Union batteries answered, then went quiet one by one to save ammunition and draw the infantry out. It worked.

Around three, roughly 12,000 men under Pickett, Pettigrew and Trimble stepped out of the trees on Seminary Ridge and started across three-quarters of a mile of open farmland. Union artillery took them in front and on both flanks. Rifle fire from the stone wall began at two hundred yards.

A few hundred reached the wall and briefly broke over it. Within an hour it was finished. More than half of them did not come back. Lee rode out to meet the survivors, saying the fault was his.

The painting puts the viewer behind the wall, looking out. A single officer stands with his arm raised, holding back the volley, while the men crouched along the stones sight down their rifles. Their backs are to us; their attention is entirely on the field.

And the field is the picture — a mile of ripening grass, and across it, in three long ranks, the Confederate lines coming on under their flags. The sun sits low on the left. The arm has not come down yet.