In a bare room with plain walls, a ladder-back chair and a closed door, Ulysses S. Grant stands at the left of a small wooden table with a hand on his hip. Across it, Robert E.

Lee, in gray with a sword at his side, leans over and rests a gloved hand beside a paper. Officers in dark uniforms and broad-brimmed hats stand watching behind each man. The scene is Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, where Lee surrendered his army in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house. Alonzo Chappel, better known for Revolutionary War scenes, painted this small oil on paperboard, about 12 by 17 inches, around 1870.

In the real parlor, Grant and Lee sat at separate tables during the writing of the terms, and one historian notes that early pictures either swapped them or, like Chappel's, put them at one table, a gesture of reconciliation on Grant's terms. Chappel made a second, different Appomattox painting. This one came to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1981 as a gift of Nancy L. Ross in memory of Patricia Firestone Chatham.

It belongs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.