Alfred R. Waud

1828-1891

British/American (London; England; Marietta, Georgia; New York, New York)

Alfred R. Waud was an important illustrator of mid-19th century America. After studying at the Royal Academy in London Waud moved to Boston in 1850 and began a successful career supplying woodcuts to engravers and publishers. During the Civil War he was employed as a Special Artist for Harper's Weekly and covered the four-year campaign of the Army of the Potomac. Waud's battlefield sketches show charging brigades, dust, smoke, and falling soldiers; the live action that was absent in photographs of the war.

After the war Waud became a freelance illustrator and photographer. He worked in the South and the West and began to use a camera to record the prominent details of his chosen subjects. It is believed that one of his battlefield colleagues, Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, or Timothy O'Sullivan, taught Waud photography, though he could easily have learned rudimentary tintype from the many itinerant photographers who followed the armies and supplied cheap portraits to soldiers.