Lie Like An Artist
The Battle of San Jacinto (1895)
Last Saturday I went to visit the Senate chambers in the Texas State Capitol. Two paintings that depict the crucial battles in the Texas Revolution flank the immense copper doors: Dawn at the Alamo and The Battle of San Jacinto.
I’m no art buff. But these were seriously impressive works of art. Click on the images of the paintings and you’ll see what I mean. Even viewed on a computer screen, the detail in these floor-to-ceiling works of art is staggering.
Dawn at the Alamo (1905)
You can hear the pounding of cannon fire and the shrill screams of the wounded. Feel the heat of the sun in San Jacinto and the chill of the dawn in Alamo. Almost smell the scent of sweat, blood, and smoke.
But somehow, they’re all a lie. These scenes never happened exactly like this in real life. The soldiers didn’t pose and raise their hands to the sky. Swordsmen didn’t pause right before slicing through their opponents’ ribs.
The artist himself never even saw these battles in person. The painter Henry Arthur McArdle was born a month after the battle of San Jacinto happened.
How was McArdle able to paint such convincing, detailed lies that still resonate with truth to us today?
Digging for the answer to this question fascinated me.
In his MasterClass, Neil Gaiman said that great fiction is about lying with the truth. He says, “What you're doing is lying, but you're using the truth in order to make your lies convincing and true.” The corollary here is that impactful art is about dramatizing the truth.
According to our tour guide, McArdle did painstaking truth-finding to produce these two paintings. He conducted countless interviews with veterans, pored through maps and sketches, probably went to these places himself.
No Wikipedia entries, YouTube interviews, Otter.ai, or digital recording devices. Just faces, names, conversations, stories, recorded by hands that scribbled furiously on parchment.
The McArdle Notebooks is the manifestation of this labor — two massive ledgers, one for each painting, stuffed with photos, documents, and interview notes. These details helped him frame the events and settings of Alamo and San Jacinto so vividly that they have stood the test of time.
Bob Woodward, the reporter who broke the Watergate Scandal, insists that journalists are always being used by others — influential sources, terrified suspects, vengeful victims, biased eyewitnesses — to advance their own causes and tell their side of the story. Reporters then have the responsibility to tell the truest, fullest version of the story that they can.
As an artist, McArdle did something similar: he used the depth of his research to advance his own agenda. He tried to be as accurate as he could — from the stone fortifications to the era’s uniforms and weapons — so he could subtly depart from the historical narrative to add in symbols and characters that he hoped would inspire patriotism in future Texans.
The lesson here? The truth by itself is banal, but all great artists exaggerate, dramatize, redact, and dedact to draw our attention to an overlooked fragment of reality.
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