In The Last Meeting's Lost Cause, by Estill Curtis Pennington, Everett D. B. Julio's painting The Last Meeting of Lee and Jackson receives extensive study rather than a simple artistic evaluation. This painting represents history as the artist distilled and preserved it in 1872. Pennington places the work in its context, but he also attends to the artist and the painting itself. He explains that Julio "had great hopes the painting would be the cornerstone of his efforts to become the principal history painter for the South and for what he [Julio], by 1870, identified as the Southern cause."

A native of Kentucky, Estill Curtis Pennington is the author of several articles and exhibition catalogs dealing with southern art. After holding positions at the Smithsonian Institution, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in Laurel, Mississippi, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, Pennington now lives in Bourbon County, Kentucky.