Winslow Homer’s “Prisoners from the Front” (1866), at the Metropolitan Museum. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

The most telling of all paintings about the Civil War, Winslow Homer’s “Prisoners from the Front” (1866), is enough on its own to save “The Civil War and American Art,” a show at the Metropolitan Museum, from the general inadequacy of art in the face of traumatizing world events. “Prisoners” pictures a youthful Union brigadier general, Francis Barlow, confronting a trio of captured Confederates—about to be fellow-citizens again, against their will—on a devastated field. Barlow, crisp and cool, with his hands clasped behind him, radiates professional rectitude. Two of the rebels are clad in near-rags: one is an inattentive, shambling young lout; the other a white-bearded man, his face clenched with anxiety. The third is a long-haired cavalier in high boots, his tight gray uniform negligently buttoned and his cap set at a rakish angle. He might be challenging his captor to a staring match. But Barlow is impervious; he lacks nothing except, perhaps, historical prescience. Does he detect in the prisoners the enduring alienation that we do? Homer, a rare artist who cannot lie, grasps and conveys that the Civil War was not really over, as it may never be.

“The Civil War and American Art” complements another show at the Met, “Photography and the American Civil War,” which opened in April with a theatrical profusion of vintage prints, stereographs, ambrotypes, and tintypes, notably from the studios of the pioneering photojournalist Mathew Brady and of Alexander Gardner, a former Brady staff photographer who set up in competition with him. Hung on walls painted dark taupe or covered with tent canvas, many of the images are so familiar from Ken Burns’s TV miniseries “The Civil War” that the dainty and glum strains of “Ashokan Farewell” all but play in a viewer’s mind’s ear, though without the formerly soothing effect. The most unforgettable shots survey corpse-strewn battlefields, mainly from the principal sites of Confederate invasions of the North, at Antietam and Gettysburg. Not surprisingly, both shows are overwhelmingly Northern in their points of view: the South, its economy crippled, could not sustain much of a market for wartime art.

The grisly death images, which were on view during the war at Brady’s and Gardner’s galleries in New York and Washington, D.C., help to explain why so little art and literature of the time trafficked in visions of military glory. On both home fronts, patriotic zeal had to share consciousness with a steadily accumulating horror and disgust. Judging from the evidence of the newer show, most painters responded to the cataclysm with benumbed or melancholy detachment, competently illustrating fortifications and encampments or, if the curator Eleanor Jones Harvey’s somewhat strained interpretations of works by leading talents of Hudson River School painting are to be believed, investing unrelated landscapes with moods of mournfulness and alarm. (That said, Harvey’s catalogue text stands as a monumental, often thrilling feat of detailed scholarship. She is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where the show began last year.)

“The real war will never get in the books,” Walt Whitman wrote. (I fancy him imagining a personal sufferer for each number in every toll of the dead and wounded.) It would not have got onto canvas but for Homer, who, in his twenties, lived it as a magazine illustrator embedded at times with a New York infantry unit. He is represented by thirteen paintings, all riveting. Only two depict combat. “Sharpshooter” (1863) finds a Union sniper athletically perched in a tree and intent on his task. In the harrowing “Skirmish in the Wilderness” (1864), it is impossible to tell what, exactly, is happening in the dark Virginia woods fretted with odd puffs of smoke and glints of bayonets. A cluster of four soldiers, one of them downed, appears small, confused, and desperately vulnerable. The Wilderness—where, in the spring of 1864, Grant first attacked Lee—was among the most nightmarish of the war’s engagements. An anonymous photograph, circa 1864-65, discovers abundant bones and skulls in the underbrush of the battleground. Outdoing it in grotesquerie is a photograph from Cold Harbor, taken in 1865 by the journeyman John Reekie, of a burial crew harvesting remains that center on a shod, ownerless foot, which you might immediately wish, as I did, that you hadn’t seen.

But Homer’s most important efforts, like “Prisoners,” are quiet, singling out persons within uniforms. Of special note is “The Bright Side” (1865), in which four black Union teamsters relax outside a tent, from which another pokes his head, clenching a pipe in his teeth and glaring at us. Here are men of rangy dignity, defying any objectifying gaze. Certainly, no contemporary white artist looked with clearer eyes than Homer did at formerly enslaved Americans. A Union man, he was hardly neutral, but his first allegiance was to truth. His painting “A Visit from the Old Mistress” (1876) reports on the state of the nation a decade after “Prisoners.” A lone figure of authority, in this case a stony white dowager, faces three antagonists: variously unwelcoming black women, in head scarves, one of whom holds a child. The interloper evidently must bargain for services that used to be her perquisite. She may get them, but with no conceivable abatement of the festering memories and the interminable consequences of slavery. The painting’s shadowed tones and ruddy hues suspend the scene in an aspic of anguish.

The most accessible element in the shows for me is the intermittent evidence of human moral frailty—one thing, at least, that we might only too easily imagine in ourselves, were we transported to the terrible epoch. A good deal less fathomable is the character of the men who weathered storms of lead for four years that must have seemed like—and for hundreds of thousands became—eternity. Death subjected a few of those men to the rancid ingenuity of Gardner, who staged some battlefield photographs by moving bodies around and who could blithely identify the same ones, snapped from different angles, as Confederate or Union. A rebel at Gettysburg had to have died slowly, because his corpse, still flexible when Gardner found it two days after the battle, could be made to perform like a puppet in two picturesque scenarios.

Then there was the resourcefulness of Frederic Church, when the unveiling, in New York City, of “The Icebergs” (1861), his vast masterpiece depicting a mountain of ice in a sullen sea, was upstaged by the South Carolinian shelling of Fort Sumter. He promptly retitled the work “The North,” exploiting an emergent, bellicose symbolism, endorsed by no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the North’s wintry virtue, as opposed to the South’s tropical depravity. This theme turned impolitic when, the next year, Church took the painting to London. England, largely because of the cotton trade, was rife with Southern sympathies. Church resurrected the title “The Icebergs,” brushed in details of a shipwreck, and advertised the result as a tribute to British Arctic explorers—many of whom attended the opening. A public triumph, and the sale of a picture, ensued.

Even Abraham Lincoln isn’t spared the shows’ stirrings of skepticism. Whether or not vanity figures in the famous photographs of him, propagandistic intent surely does, projecting the rock-solid commander that, in most pinches, Lincoln happened to be. But it takes nothing away from his achievements—crucially, articulating for the Civil War a significance that could outlast and be commensurate with its awfulness—that he generally knew what he was doing and coolly calculated how to do it. Steven Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln” got that strikingly right—when not indulging, forgivably, in boilerplate pathos. Much the same can be said of the Met shows. They tacitly expose the rhetorical contrivances with which the common run of painters and photographers massaged emotional content into the national ordeal. But an unsated hunger for meaning forbids us cynicism, even a hundred and forty-eight years after Appomattox. Here Winslow Homer imparts courage. He understands us. He gave shape and form to the heart-deep dilemmas that were, and remain, our Civil War. ♦