Battery, Forward! (also known as Bringing Up the Battery, Artillery to the Front, Civil War Battle Scene)

Son of Jonathan Trego, graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and winner of the academy’s first Charles Toppan Prize, William B. T. Trego is known primarily for his action-packed Civil War scenes. At the age of two, the artist was stricken with polio, a disease that left him with crippled feet and almost totally paralyzed hands. He painted by bracing the brush in his paralyzed right hand and using his barely flexible fingers to guide his strokes as he moved his body.

While studying with Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Trego would certainly have been aware of his teacher’s interest in modeling the action of horses after British photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking photographs of horses in motion. As a student at the academy in 1883, he would have been able to attend Muybridge’s lecture “The Romance and Reality of Animals in Motion,” in which Muybridge used a projecting zoetrope to show his photographs of animal locomotion.