Our Banner in the Sky

How the sky becomes a flag

The design works through a sequence of recognitions. First comes a landscape with water, wooded banks and a brilliant sky. Then the arrangement of colour resolves into a flag: the blue opening contains stars, and the long red and light cloud bands suggest stripes. The tree on the left makes the connection clearer. Its stripped trunk rises diagonally from the foreground and serves visually as a flagstaff. Terra describes the flag as a temporary arrangement of sky, clouds and stars, seemingly supported by that barren tree.^[1]

Church leaves the cloud forms irregular. Their edges fray, their widths vary, and the light passes between them. The flag is recognisable without becoming a rigid rectangle laid over the landscape. This is central to the image’s appeal: natural effects seem to assemble themselves into a national emblem. The viewer can move between reading the sky as weather and reading it as a symbol.

The darker ground helps that transformation. Low hills and silhouetted trees make a base beneath the brighter sky; water occupies the lower part of the Terra version. The tall bare trunk links these two areas, carrying the eye upward from a quiet foreground towards the stars. Because the scene contains no large human figure, the political message depends on the landscape itself. That absence becomes especially noticeable when the design is compared with its wartime adaptations.

Fort Sumter and the significance of the flag

The composition belongs to the first months of the Civil War. Confederate batteries began bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on 12 April 1861. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the Union garrison on 13 April, and the soldiers evacuated on 14 April. The National Archives preserves a transcription of Anderson’s 18 April telegram reporting the withdrawal, the damage to the fort and the departure with the flag. These dates place Church’s design in an immediate wartime setting.^[2]

For Union supporters, the flag carried a particular emotional charge after the loss of the fort. In his study of Church and the Civil War, art historian Kevin J. Avery describes the public response in New York, including the great Union Square rally at which the Sumter flag was displayed. Church’s celestial banner emerged in the weeks following this mobilisation. It offered a form of patriotic reassurance that could be understood without depicting the bombardment or a battlefield.^[3]

The flag in the picture appears above a landscape that has not itself been destroyed. Its survival in the heavens can be read as a hopeful answer to the threatened national symbol on the ground. That reading belongs to the work’s pro-Union context. Terra emphasises its appeal to Northern wartime audiences; such enthusiasm should not be confused with a shared response across a country at war. The title’s possessive word, Our, invites viewers to identify with a particular national allegiance.^[1]

Dawn, light and hope

The glowing reds and yellows might initially suggest either morning or evening. Olana’s account of Church’s wartime art identifies the design with sunrise, placing its making in May 1861. Dawn gives the patriotic image a forward-looking emphasis: the country’s emblem appears as light returns. This is an interpretive setting for the composition rather than a record of an exact hour observed outdoors.^[4]

The blue area and bright points retain something of night even as the lower sky brightens. Their relationship to the lighter bands makes the celestial flag possible. Church uses the transition between darkness and illumination to join atmospheric spectacle with a political meaning. A scientifically identified star is unnecessary to that effect; the points work primarily as the flag’s stars.

The damaged-looking tree also matters visually. A living leafy canopy would obscure the blue field and break the resemblance to a flagstaff. Here the exposed trunk supplies the necessary vertical support while preserving the appearance of a natural object. Its stark silhouette and the glowing sky allow the viewer to associate vulnerability on earth with endurance above. This is a way of reading the composition, rather than evidence that every branch carried a separately documented message.

From oil sketch to published print

Our Banner in the Sky is the name of a design represented by several objects. Terra explains that Church made an initial oil sketch after the April attack on Fort Sumter. In June 1861 he was commissioned to produce a chromolithograph after it. The oil sketch and the published reproduction therefore belong to the same early wartime sequence, although they are different physical works.^[1]

Chromolithography offered a means of reproducing the design in colour. Goupil & Co. was associated with its publication, and Avery reports that the lithographs sold briskly in the months that followed. The small image could circulate beyond the audience able to visit an exhibition or purchase an original painting. Its clear emblem and dramatic lighting made it suited to this movement from an artist’s composition into a reproducible patriotic picture.^[3]

The Terra object adds another stage to that history. Oil paint lies over a printed image, so calling it simply an oil painting leaves out part of its construction. The foundation describes it as one of several lithographs presumably painted by Church himself. That qualification is significant: the association with his design is secure, while his personal application of paint is expressed as probable. The object should be identified by its collection and medium whenever it is reproduced.^[1]

What the Olana version reveals

A separate version at Olana illustrates why close material study can change the understanding of a familiar image. Karen Zukowski’s Historic Furnishings Report identifies object OL.1976.29 as a painting over a chromolithograph. According to the report, the work had previously been considered an original oil sketch, but microscopic examination in 1998 revealed the printed layer. It attributes the painting over the print probably to Church.^[5]

The report also records two other forms of the design at Olana: a chromolithograph and a print with paint applied to part of it. Together, these objects show that the boundary between an original image and its reproduction can involve further artistic work. A print might remain a print, receive limited additions or become the support for a more extensive painted version. Those distinctions are useful when comparing colour, surface and detail across reproductions.^[5]

This finding concerns the Olana object. It should not be used to transfer Olana’s accession number or dimensions to the Terra version illustrated here. Both belong to the history of Church’s composition, and both combine printing and paint, but their collection records identify separate works. A caption that supplies only the title and year can conceal that difference.

Patriotism, circulation and a separate fundraiser

Church’s response to the war extended beyond this small banner image. In April 1861 he exhibited The Icebergs in New York. As troops passed the exhibition venue, he retitled the painting The North and arranged for admission receipts to support the Patriotic Fund for soldiers’ families. Avery and Olana discuss this exhibition as part of his engagement with the Union cause.^[3][4]

That fundraiser and the circulation of Our Banner in the Sky are related expressions of wartime allegiance, but the documented donation concerns the exhibition receipts. It does not establish that every sale of the banner print financed the same fund. The distinction makes Church’s activity more precise: a monumental painting could generate contributions through admission, while a compact patriotic design could spread through published copies.

The contrast in scale is striking. The Icebergs depends on an imposing expanse of Arctic scenery, while the banner composition communicates through a few immediately recognisable forms. In both cases Church used the audience for landscape art within the circumstances of the war. The smaller image gave that connection its most overt emblem.

A soldier replaces the tree

The accompanying historic print, Our Heaven Born Banner, shows how another image-maker adapted the idea. The Library of Congress catalogue description, reproduced on its Commons image record, credits the painting to William Bauly, the lithography to Sarony, Major & Knapp, and publication to William Schaus. It dates the print to about 1861 and records its deposit for copyright on 6 September that year. The catalogue considers it based on Church’s painting or the Goupil reproduction.^[6]

A sentry now stands on the rocky foreground, facing the luminous sky. His upright rifle and bayonet replace the tree’s function as the apparent flagstaff. The celestial stripes and star field remain, but the addition of a soldier makes the relationship to military service explicit. Beyond him are water, wooded shores and a small fort, identified by the catalogue as probably Fort Sumter. The reproduced picture area makes these compositional changes easy to compare.

The catalogue also records eight lines of verse accompanying the print. The illustration here shows the picture area, with the printed margins and verse absent. Even without that verbal framing, the soldier, weapon and distant fort make the adaptation more specific to war. It is a separate patriotic print drawing on Church’s motif, with its own makers and publisher.^[6]

Looking alongside Church’s other skies

Comparison with Twilight in the Wilderness helps explain how Church could make an emblem out of atmospheric colour. Both compositions give substantial space to cloud bands and brilliant illumination above darker land. In Our Banner in the Sky, however, the blue opening, stars and tree organise that familiar landscape vocabulary into a clearly identifiable national image. Avery links the design to Church’s earlier twilight studies and distinguishes its unusually direct patriotism from the more interpretive political readings of later landscapes.^[3]

Aurora Borealis offers a further comparison: luminous phenomena again dominate the scene, but they do not form such a plainly readable flag. Keeping that difference in view allows the banner picture to retain its particular character. It is a small, topical composition whose power comes from making a natural spectacle carry an immediately recognisable public symbol, and whose print history helped that symbol travel.