The Military and Historical Portrait Group, 19th Century patent 1893 — a year inscribed

1893 — a year inscribed on the ledger of the Gilded Age's reckoning

Benjamin Robbins Curtis 1899 — a posthumous portrait of the Supreme Court Justice whose dissent in Dred Scott broke ranks and whose name was thereafter spoken with the weight of a man who chose conscience over comity

Marys River spills into the Atlantic — the elevation traces a tapered shaft and lantern room that once guided cotton schooners past the Cumberland shoals before storm and abandonment erased it from the dunes

dramatic against light walls and well-suited to celestial subjects

where adobe missions and the white arcades of the Hotel San Carlos trade postcard space with desert sunsets the color of struck flint

The Military and Historical Portrait Group, 19th Century patent 1893 — a year inscribedThe Military and Historical Portrait Group, 19th Century assembles the engraved faces of a long century generals in epaulets, statesmen in high collars, the republic's familiar pantheon arranged shoulder to shoulder as if convened for a single sober daguerreotype of national memory. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical societies, and