As the country prepares to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg next week, an exhibition now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, featuring a number of major loans, purports to showcase artistic responses to the Civil War.

With 60 paintings and 18 photographs made between 1852 and 1877, The Civil War and American Art, organized by Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Eleanor Harvey, has gathered many historically relevant artworks. Small panels by Confederate soldier Conrad Wise Chapman document the South’s defense of Charleston Harbor

Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862, 1862, depicting a family of three on a galloping horse, records, according to the artist’s inscription, “a veritable incident in the civil war seen by myself.” After obtaining permission to visit troops encamped outside Washington DC, Albert Bierstadt painted Guerrilla Warfare, Civil War, 1862, a small group of Union riflemen shown picking off their enemies across a field.

But some of the pieces lack a clear connection to the Civil War. Frederic Edwin Church’s monumental canvases of South America’s tropics and images of Arctic glaciers are installed in a gallery titled ‘Landscapes of War,’ never mind that these exotic scenes, far away from the battlefield, are devoid of figures.

A Hudson River School artist, Church’s works reveal a fascination with the strength and beauty of nature. But Ms. Harvey, writing in the exhibition catalog about Icebergs, 1861, an enormous painting completed before the onset of the Civil War, with preparatory studies going years back, says the icebergs here are “a powerful metaphor for the righteousness of the Union cause-and for the inevitable end of slavery.”

A smaller work by Church shows a meteor breaking apart in the sky, a phenomenon the artist witnessed in the summer of 1860. Though this, too, occurred before the conflict began, Ms. Harvey says we are looking at “a meteor of war.” Pulling from news reports comparing the event to a rocket crossing the sky, the curator concludes “the metaphors consistently invoked artillery, as though the very sky were already at war,” another (of many) attempts here to recontextualize Civil War-era landscape paintings.

The most compelling artworks in this exhibition are by Sanford R. Gifford and Winslow Homer, both painters directly involved in the conflict. Gifford, a successful second-generation Hudson River School artist, enlisted with New York’s Seventh Regiment out of a sense of patriotism.

During his three summers with the Union army, the Luminist landscape painter wrote letters shedding light on the relationship between art and the Civil War, drawing a distinction between what he called his “historico-military” artworks versus his “unwarlike” pictures. Seven of Gifford’s military scenes are presented here, as well as A Coming Storm, 1863, a tranquil autumnal landscape set to be disrupted by dark storm clouds.

Working as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly, Winslow Homer captured the dangers, discomforts and moral-complexities of life on the front lines. Sharpshooter, 1863, Homer’s first known oil painting, portrays a Union marksman, perched in the branches of a pine tree, finger on the trigger of his rifle. The gun’s long barrel provides a horizontal axis that steadies the composition as the soldier takes aim.

Home, Sweet Home, c. 1863, a painting named after a tune popular with troops on both sides, depicts two disheveled soldiers by a tent, an unappetizing pot of food warming on a fire at their feet. In the background the band strikes up a melody, an un-cozy scene.

Homer’s artistic development was shaped by his wartime work. The sure, painterly touch and matter-of-fact storytelling evident in works here became hallmarks of Homer’s career. Reconstruction Era paintings in the exhibit include Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field, 1865, a figure with a scythe, back to the viewer, cutting wheat as families return to the business of everyday living.

After the war, Homer’s straight-forward, distinctly American images resonated with the public, as the metaphoric landscapes of Gifford and Church lost favor. Nevertheless, Gifford was an early supporter of Homer, sponsoring his membership to the National Academy. And though we know little about their friendship, Gifford owned Trooper Meditating Beside a Grave, 1865, Homer’s small painting of a Union soldier reflecting on the costs of war, a figure, Ms. Harvey tells us “has Gifford’s lean build and contemplative air.”

The Civil War and American Art, on view through September 2, 2013 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 212-570-3951, metmuseum.org

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com