Bombardment of Fort Fisher, 1888

Fort Fisher, outside Wilmington, North Carolina, was the last Confederate port to fall to Union troops in the Civil War. This Confederate loss, which isolated the South from trade routes, solidified the path to Union victory. US Navy Master Thomas F. Laycock’s drawing of the Bombardment of Fort Fisher, 15 January 1865, became the basis of a widely-circulated, well-known lithograph published by Endicott & Co., New York, in 1865. By the 1880s, long after his honorable discharge in December 1865, Laycock was a practicing artist, working in oil paint, watercolor and ink. He displayed paintings in California State Agricultural Fairs in the mid-1880s, and won several awards for multiple artworks in the 1887 Nevada State Fair (Thirteenth Session of the Legislature of the State of Nevada, 1887 (Carson City, 1887), pp. 28-29). Laycock revisited his older drawing of Fort Fisher in the year before his death to create this large-scale, painted version of his famous rendering.