Oil on canvas, signed lower right. Expansive landscape with two Civil War soldiers camped under an ominous sky. Retains its original frame. 26" high, 36" wide (canvas), 33.75" high, 43.75" wide (overall). John F.E. Hillen (1819-1865) immigrated from Brussels as a young man, finding work in New York in the 1840s as a lithographer for Frank and James Beard, before moving to Philadelphia by the 1850s, where he lived with his wife Isabella, also an artist, and their daughter. By 1859, he had moved to Cincinnati, where he opened an art school downtown at Fourth and Vine Streets to teach drawing and painting. He enlisted in the Union Army in the summer of 1861, but was disabled by a wound the following year, leading to his discharge from the 34th Ohio Infantry. After his drawings depicting his war experiences were published in Harper?s that same year, he found work as a correspondent, and as a result, he was present for key moments of the remaining years of the war. Hillen was captured at Chickamauga in 1863, held as a prisoner in Stevenson, Alabama, for a time, and then followed General Sherman?s troops in their march to Atlanta. The scenes of the war, from camp life to battlefields to the battle for Atlanta, were published in Frank Leslie?s Illustrated Newspaper. Sadly, Hillen?s war wounds did not completely heal and left him in ill health. He died on August 11, 1865, just a few months after the end of the war, at Frank Beard?s studio in New York.

Lined, two very well-done repaired tears (4-6" each), a few other minor spots of inpainting