Conrad Wise Chapman was born in Washington D.C. in 1842. He was a member of one of nineteenth-century America’s best known arts family dynasties. The Virginia Chapmans, John Gadsby Chapman (1808-89) and his sons John Linton (1839-1905) and Conrad Wise, were southern counterparts to the Peales of Pennsylvania and the Weirs of New York. Chapman spent his first few years between Washington and New York City, until 1848, when his father moved the family to Europe. After a brief stay in Paris and Florence, the Chapmans settled in Rome, where their father trained Conrad and his brother John Linton for careers in art. By the end of 1850, both sons were producing and selling very fine pictures of Italian peasants, landscapes, and the most popular attractions of the Eternal City.

When word of the first Civil War Battles reached Rome, Conrad ran away from home and journeyed to America to enlist in the Confederate army. Unable to reach Virginia, Chapman settled for service in a regiment in Kentucky. He saw action at Shiloh, were he suffered a serious head wound, and was transferred to Virginia in 1862. After an uneventful year spent far from fighting, Chapman and his regiment were sent farther south to take part in the defense of Charleston, South Carolina. During the months he spent in the Cradle of the Confederacy, Chapman was assigned the special duty of making pictorial records of the fortifications and novel weapons devised by the city's defenders. By the time Chapman returned to duty in the spring of 1865, Charleston and all other southern ports had fallen, and he found himself in Texas. Too proud at the war's end to face humiliation and subjugation in the defeated South, Chapman had little choice but to move on to Mexico.

For the rest of his life, the artist remained “unreconstructed,” unwilling to pledge allegiance to the victorious United States and discontent to live in the defeated Confederacy. Chapman suffered periodic bouts of depression that may have been symptoms of his Shiloh head wound or despondency at the Confederate defeat. Despite his health problems, his exile from Virginia and the lost Confederate States, and poverty, Chapman had a distinguished post-Civil War career painting landscapes and genre scenes in Mexico and in Europe. He and his family members systematically transformed his field sketches and oil studies into enduring visual representations of the Confederacy and of the face of nineteenth-century warfare.