Grant and his Generals from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery

One of the planned stops for my trip to DC this week that I hadn’t had the opportunity to tour before was the National Portrait Gallery. And it did not disappoint with the tremendous history of our country through art and portraiture.

As I toured through the building, this caught my eye, as it includes a famous (or rather infamous) subject from South Dakota History, General George Armstrong Custer, in it’s depiction of General (and later president) Grant:

Off to the left, you see General Custer:

And here’s the description of the portrait.

A massive life-size version of the painting is in an adjacent stairwell.

Captured in 1864-1865, the painting came about 4 years before Grant’s rise to the presidency, and 11 years before Custer’s defeat and death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

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