[Disabled Union Soldiers Posed in Aid of the U.S. Sanitary Commission at the New York Metropolitan Fair]

Organized in June 1861 and conceived and managed primarily by female volunteers, the privately funded United States Sanitary Commission helped soldiers with back pay and other logistical needs related to their convalescence. It raised money and distributed supplies to battlefield and camp hospitals through donations and hosting sanitary fairs that charged admission to the public. The April 1864 New York Metropolitan Fair raised more than $178,000. It featured a presentation of recently captured Confederate weapons and a “Picture Gallery” that included loans of paintings and sculptures from the city’s finest collections as well as works commissioned from Albert Bierstadt, Asher B. Durand, and John F. Kensett, among the most important artists of the era.
Some visitors chose to support the patriotic cause in an even more direct way by purchasing carte-de-visite portraits of wounded soldiers who posed during the fair as part of a living tableau. The three Union soldiers here were survivor-representatives of “the blank horror and reality of war, in opposition to its pageantry,” as Gardner observed of the corpses in O’Sullivan’s photograph A Harvest of Death. The blind man, William R. Mudge, Second Massachusetts Infantry, was shot through the head and lost both eyes at the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, on May 3, 1863. In Lynn, Massachusetts, before the war, he had been a photographer.