General Marion and His Men in Pee Dee Swamp

A Clarke County, Virginia born artist, William Dickinson Washington painted portraits and military genre scenes. He was especially known for a work titled The Burial of Latane, an image generally associated with the lost cause of the South. He was close to this subject because he had been a civilian draftsman for General Robert E. Lee.

The artist trained in Washington, DC and in Dusseldorf, Germany at the Academy with Emanuel Leutze, and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, and the Washington Art Association, for which he served as the first vice president. In 1864, with physical injuries from the war, he established a studio in Richmond, Virginia. In 1869, he taught art at the Virginia Military Academy. He died in 1870 in Lexington, Virginia.

This small oil sketch depicting the military camp at Pee Dee Swamp, South Carolina, of The Revolutionary War’s Brigadier General Francis Marion, also known as the “Swamp Fox,” served as a study for a larger painting and was exhibited at the Washington Art Association in Washington, DC in 1859.