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THE MANY IMAGES OF LINCOLN
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Generations earlier, one of the men who knew Abraham Lincoln best, his private secretary John G. Nicolay, had insisted: "there are many pictures of Lincoln; there is no portrait of him."
"In a countenance of strong lines and rugged masses like Lincoln's", he wrote, "the lift of an eye, the movements of prominent muscles created a much wider facial play than in rounded immobile countenances. Lincoln's features were the despair of every artist who undertook his portrait."
Nicolay recalled "nearly a dozen, one after another, soon after the first nomination to the presidency, attempt the task," with results which he felt were "no more like the man as the grain of sand is to the mountain, as the dead to the living." Concluded Nicolay: "graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate graduations of line and contour." Still the artists poured into Springfield, Illinois, observing Lincoln as he worked, and producing unique - if not always reliable - records of the Illinois Republican on the eve of the presidency.
Interestingly, the very first — and perhaps the most successful — of all the life portraits of Abraham Lincoln was a sculpture. It was the work of Leonard Wells Volk, a cousin of the wife of Lincoln’s arch-rival in politics, Stephen A. Douglas. But politics seldom inhibited artistic expression (besides which Volk had already made a sculpture of "The Little Giant" by the time he first glimpsed Lincoln on the stump with Douglas in the Great Debates of 1858). Volk decided immediately he must sculpt the tall Springfield Republican, and proceeded to exact from Lincoln a vague promise that he would one day pose for him. Two years passed before Volk encountered Lincoln again, this time in a Chicago courtroom where Lincoln was pleading a case. Again Volk asked for sittings, and again Lincoln expressed willingness — along with regrets that he simply did not have at his leisure the long hours needed to do so.
Volk had an idea — and it would change forever the history of the sculpted Lincoln. To save Lincoln from time-consuming sitting. Volk proposed making a plaster cast of his face, which he would then use to make his bust portrait. Lincoln reluctantly agreed to submit to the process, but found the ordeal, on March 31, 1860, "anything but agreeable." With straws inserted into his nostrils to permit him to breathe, cold wet plaster was applied, and when it tightened around his features and dried, Volk grabbed hold of it and pulled it off in one piece, tugging some facial hairs out along with it and literally bringing tears to Lincoln’s eyes.
A later sculptor of Lincoln, George Grey Barnard, called the life mask which Volk then produced from this mold "the most wonderful face left to us...his powerful constructions reaching like steps of a pyramid from chin to ear, eye and brain, as if his force took birth in thought within, conceived in architecture without, building to the furthermost limits of his face." Understandably, Barnard and a host of his fellow artists would come eventually to rely on this landmark portrait as a model for their own memorable works. Ultimately, so would James Nance,
But first, Volk himself used the mask to aid him in the project for which he had first designed it: a portrait bust. Lincoln would eventually visit the sculptor’s Chicago studio for a few sittings in April 1860, to aid in the finishing touches; and in the end, the subject seemed eminently pleased with the result. "There," he proclaimed with wonder, "is the animal himself!"
Ironically, Volk never received for this work the attention or praise lavished on the life mask model he had created merely as a tool for creating it. But quickly sensing the commercial possibilities of his efforts, Volk decided, once his reluctant sitter unexpectedly won the Republican presidential nomination in May 1860, to continue to focus on the Lincoln theme. He would now make a heroic statue.
On May 20, 1860, Volk arrived in Springfield to ask Lincoln if he might make plaster casts of his large, sinewy hands as models for his more ambitious work. Lincoln consented, but cautioned that his right hand that day was unnaturally puffy and swollen from endless handshaking the night before with post-nomination well-wishers. Volk simply suggested that Lincoln grasp something to hide the swelling while the cast was being taken. The candidate marched off to his woodshed to saw off a piece of broom handle to hold, and as Lincoln returned, he was trimming the sawn end with a pocket knife. When Volk remarked that it was not necessary that the prop be smooth, Lincoln sheepishly replied: "Oh, well, I thought I would like to have it nice." The hands cast, Volk now proceeded on a long career of Lincoln sculpting — with mixed results.
His great ambition — a full-length statue —was ultimately achieved, but without attracting much praise or attention. That may be because by the time he completed his work, like so many sculptors who would follow, Volk decided to abandon the beardless Lincoln he had known personally and substitute the bewhiskered man who left Illinois for Washington, never to return, in 1861. Volk’s statues, copies of which stand in Springfield and Rochester, somehow fail to convey either Lincoln with much conviction — an odd result, considering Volk’s unparalleled exposure to the living man.
He fared far better with adaptations, in both plaster and bronze, of his life masks, hand-casts, and busts — some small-sized, some larger-than-life, some nude, others draped — but all evoking the vigor of the prewar Lincoln. George Gray Barnard called one of these bronze variants "the best thing done in Lincoln’s lifetime" — even though the bust he praised, like many of the others dated 1860," was likely cast between the 1880’s and the turn of the century. Motivated— both artistically and commercially — by the huge outpouring of public interest in Lincoln portraits following his 1865 death, Volk made Lincoln his principal industry for the rest of his life. No one ever did more to originate, or perpetuate, the Lincoln image in the sculptural art. But Volk was not the only sculptor to pose Abraham Lincoln from life. The first portrait in any medium to show him with his new beard, in fact, was also a sculpture, the work of a former New York stone mason named Thomas Dow Jones. Jones had been a professional sculptor for three years when the citizens of Columbus, Ohio, where he was then living, commissioned him to make a bust from life of the president-elect. Jones was something of an eccentric, given to theatrical mannerisms and outrageous costumes. But Lincoln took a liking to him, and shortly after Christmas, 1860, he agreed to pose for him for an hour each day in his temporary post-election offices in a Springfield hotel room.
On one amusing occasion, Jones’ clay model was nearly destroyed. Lincoln had been reading his mail while posing, and happened upon a suspicious-looking package that both men feared might turn out to be what Jones called "an infernal machine or torpedo." Recent letters to Lincoln had included enough threats to make such a scenario seem possible. As a precaution, Lincoln and Jones together braced it against the bust-in-progress before opening it, using the sculpture, in Jones’ words, "as an earthwork, so, in case it exploded, it would not harm either of us." As it turned out, the package contained nothing more threatening than the innocent gift of a home-made pig’s tail whistle, and Lincoln spent the next hour merrily practicing on it.
Nonetheless, Jones encouraged Lincoln to keep busy with his burdensome correspondence during subsequent sittings, hoping to keep him from lapsing into inexpressive sadness, as his thoughts turned increasingly to the perilous future both he and the Union were facing. Jones would describe Lincoln as "a very difficult study," explaining that as the date of Lincoln’s departure for Washington drew nearer, "a deep-seated melancholy seemed to take possession of his soul...the former Lincoln no longer visible...his face...transformed. from mobility into an iron mask.’
But Jones underestimated his work. When Lincoln himself saw the completed bust for the first time, he exclaimed: " I think It looks very much like the critter," and the State of Ohio liked the handsome sculpture well enough to pay Jones more than $9,600 to copy it in marble to decorate the State Capitol.
The unprecedented burdens of office and war might understandably have compelled Lincoln the President to refuse subsequent requests by artists for time-consuming sittings. Instead, he made himself even more accessible than he had been as presidential candidate and president-elect, welcoming portrait artists, history painters— and more sculptors — to the White House in the dark years of his life there.
