For many years this oil portrait of General Ulysses S. Grant hung in the lobby of the Grand Union Hotel at Saratoga Springs, New York. During all of those years, while the man and his war and his Presidency grew dimmer in the mist of a half-forgotten past, American citizens presumably lounged past the ornate frame, looked up, vaguely recognized the General, and passed on without remark. The painting was made by Ole Peter Hansen Balling, who became a good friend of the General during the time consumed by the sittings. It was painted to show Grant as he was during the siege of Vicksburg.

As portraits of Grant go, it is a bit unusual. It shows a man careless of military display—he wears a major general’s insignia on a brigadier general’s uniform, one hand is jammed in a pocket, and the other hand holds a cigar instead of the conventional sword. It escapes being just one more picture of a bearded general because the artist did catch the essential Grant: the face with the sensitive, lonely eyes, over a mouth that is hard as a slit in a piece of steel plating. Balling apparently knew the man.

The portrait’s only failing is the one that is common to all portraits of U. S. Grant; it leaves out the overtones. Grant was supposed to be most unromantic and taciturn, but he had lived great pictures, and none of them ever got put on canvas—possibly because no painter ever really saw them or felt them. To paint Grant properly an artist would have to catch some hint of the hopes and ideals that other men put upon him, and although Grant himself understood these, no artist ever did, or could. In a way they were simple enough. Two scenes from the General’s life may illustrate the point.

The first: the evening of April 7, 1865, at the little town of Farmville, Virginia, when the Army of the Potomac was pursuing Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the campaign that ended two days later at Appomattox Courthouse. Reaching Farmville during the afternoon, Grant made his headquarters in a little hotel on the main street and took a seat on the porch, his staff around him, his order book in his hand. When evening came, bonfires were lighted all the way along the village street, and as the troops marched between the flames they saw the General, realized that final victory lay just ahead, and began to swing their caps and cheer. On impulse, some of the men broke ranks long enough to grab burning brands from the bonfires, and as the darkness deepened, there was an informal march-past that was half a grand review and half an impromptu torchlight parade—fires dancing and shimmering the length of the column, flags waving, bronzed young men yelling and laughing and stepping off as if all of the weariness of war had ended.