Focal Point: a visual diary of the Civil War.

The remarkable sketches, drawings and watercolors of Union Capt. Adolph G. Metzner.

“What was it like?”

To the stilted pictorial history of the Civil War — the stiff studio portraits of men in uniform, the stylized woodblock engravings of the era’s weekly news magazines, the grainy after-battle photos of the dead in the fields and romanticized oil paintings of battles never seen by their artists — we can add these: a collection of 137 …