 You came from Gettysburg. Am I right about that? All right, so Civil War is fresh in your mind, right? This is a tiny little scene of mathematics. Feel free to come closer or maybe, you know, take a look and then let someone else come in. It is a challenge sometimes to work with these much smaller paintings. This is the scene of the surrender. Grant and Lee are meeting in order to officially end the war, although, of course, it wouldn't exactly end right at this moment. How has the artist chosen to present the scene? If you're all the way over here, feel free to come in and fill in the front. You can tell who won. You can tell who won. That's very interesting. How can you tell who won? Well, because the Union soldier is in the front and he's got his hand on the desk and his whole chest is facing out towards the audience and it's kind of like, it's almost like a teacher's stance to somebody, you're scolding the child. I mean, that's the kind of look at it. It's like, I can't believe he just did this and that's what he's doing because Lee was such a highly regarded officer in the military at the time. It's almost like he's looking at, like, why did you do this to yourself and us and kind of like he's getting scolded. Okay. What about Lee though? He's nice about the cowering in a corner. How does the artist show him, show this highly respected, regarded man in this sort of tough mold? I mean, he's got his hands up. I can't believe I had to do this. But it came... So it's very hard for him to do this. What else do you notice about the scene? We've got light right in the middle here. So I don't know if that means like, the light, the focus is the middle where they're green. Maybe to quit fighting. That is maybe the highlight of the moment, where the two sides are coming together. And let's use that to talk about composition. It is two sides, right? The uniforms. How are those two sides equal? Are they... We've got three soldiers, one end and two soldiers on the other end. So there's a little bit more weight over here. Even if you just look at the height of the two generals, it's roughly equal the way they're presented. You're right that Grant is slightly forward in that sort of authority stance. But if you look into surrender orders, the fact that Lee was allowed to keep his sword is a huge step. What does this say about what the North was hoping for the end of the war? The way that the scene is presented in terms of a surrender. How did they want to treat the South now that everything's over? In this moment it looks like they just want to... It's like brothers fighting, done over. Let's go back to the way things were. Let's forget about it. Of course, for history teachers, we know that it doesn't actually happen. When you look at these guys, it's not real history. Hey, I really don't care about this. Grant wasn't wearing his general bars. A few things are historically accurate. We know that he had mud on his pay. He rushed there on his horse. He borrowed a jacket, so he wasn't wearing his general's jacket. But he wasn't wearing his general's jacket. So any time you see it in an accurate system, you know it's actually wrong from what happened. For me, that's actually the most valuable part of our work. Because that's pointing out a decision that the artist made that helped tell the story. Exactly, exactly. So actually, if we read the accounts of this scene, and there are many of them, there were a ton of people in this room. So why might the artist have chosen just to show a few? Make it more intimate. Make it more intimate? How does that help tell the story? He had to illustrate the significance of the famously having to surrender, which ultimately became the turning point in the war. Okay, so it highlights him more than there are fewer people in the room.