VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

In May 2009, the Museum of Southern History at Houston Baptist Universit will welcome a unique traveling exhibit, Lee and Grant. The exhibit will be on public display June 6 - September 20.

The exhibition provides a major reassessment of the lives, careers, and historical impact of Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. The exhibit charts the development of historical thought and popular attitudes toward these significant historical figures in the years since the outbreak of the Civil War.  The exhibition was organized by the Virginia Historical Society, in partnership with the New-York Historical Society, Washington and Lee University, the Museum of the Confederacy, the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum, Arlington House—The Robert E. Lee Memorial, and Stratford Hall—The Birthplace of Robert E. Lee.

"Visitors will enjoy discovering similarities and differences between Lee and Grant that are rarely pointed out," said Dr. William M. S. Rasmussen, exhibition co-curator and the VHS Lora M. Robins Curator. "These generals have been explored by historians for decades, but Lee and Grant is the first exhibition to present the two men together so that visitors can make decisions about them, side by side, based on facts. We hope that after they view Lee and Grant, visitors will give more thought to the legacies of both generals."

Lee and Grant is made possible with the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. The exhibition presents photographs, paintings, prints, sculpture, clothing and accoutrements owned by the two men, documents written in their own hands, and biographical and historical records to reveal each man in his historical and cultural context and to review the ways each has been remembered for almost 150 years.

Lee and Grant exhibition highlights include: Grant's handwritten terms of surrender to Lee on April 9, 1865; a 1772 oil on canvas painting of George Washington owned by Mrs. Lee; a December 29, 1862 deed of emancipation signed by Lee; an 1885 original of Grant's Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant; the coat and sword of Lee before 1864; a 1782 oil on canvas portrait of Light-Horse Harry Lee by Charles Wilson Peale; an 1838 oil on canvas painting by William Edward West of Lee in his Lieutenant of Engineers dress uniform; and Lee's signed copy of his father's Funeral Oration on the Death of General Washington.  Click here for more highlights from this exhibit.

"This exhibition is more than a study of Lee and Grant," Rasmussen said. "These generals have come to symbolize the two regions that fought the Civil War-- each was a product of his region and his rearing. When we investigate the values that they championed and their decisions which literally changed the course of this country's history, we discover the sectional legacies that many contemporary Americans have inherited from southern gentry and from Yankee self-made man."

Click here for some interesting facts about these two men.

The Museum of Southern History is one of five stops the Lee and Grant exhibit will make. After closing at the VHS on March 31, 2008, Lee and Grant traveled to the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis (May 17, 2008–September 7, 2008); and then traveled to the New-York Historical Society in New York City (October 17, 2008–March 29, 2009); the Museum of Southern History in Houston (May 23, 2009–September 20, 2009); and the Atlanta History Center (November 7, 2009–February 28, 2010).

The Lee and Grant Exhibit is made possible with generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the W. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. Its presentation in Houston is sponsored by the Joella and Stewart Morris Foundation which also provided funding for the exhibition catalog, a 352-page illustrated book c0-authored by the exhibit’s curator.