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THE MANY IMAGES OF LINCOLN
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In late 1863, for example, only a few days before traveling to Gettysburg to deliver his most famous presidential address, Lincoln agreed to visit Washington photographer Alexander Gardner to sit for a series of camera studies to help sculptress Sarah Fisher Ames create a bust portrait. Historians have long described the series of memorable photographs made that day as inspired by Lincoln’s imminent departure for Gettysburg. In fact, they were inspired by a sculptor — and her need for models. Mrs. Ames sold a marble version of the bust to Congress in 1868 for $2,000.
A year later, also in Washington, a 35-year-old Pennsylvanian named William Marshal Swayne was allowed to make a bas-relief medallion portrait of Lincoln from the flesh in the President’s White House office. Lincoln obliged him because Swayne intended to auction off the result for the benefit of Civil War wounded. Even though the result was primitive, when, later that year, Swayne was commissioned to do a full bust of Lincoln for yet another war charity, Lincoln immediately consented to sit again.
To model the work Swayne set up a temporary studio on the third floor of the Treasury Department across from the White House. One day, Lincoln was heard clomping up the outdoor wooden gangplank that led to the studio, climbed into the room through a window, and announced: I’ve come to sit if you want me."
For the next several weeks (even as he was sitting simultaneously for a history painting in the White House), Lincoln obligingly returned almost every day to pose, admitting that the sessions rested him. He told stories, acted out his favorite Shakespearian soliloquies, and recited sentimental poetry, to the delight of eyewitnesses. If the resulting sculpture did not quite justify the time its illustrious sitter had devoted to its creation, it nonetheless represented a unique portrait of the President on the eve of re-nomination to the Presidency. Perhaps the fond memory of the sittings, rather than the bust itself, inspired Lincoln later to tell Swayne that his work was his very favorite "mud head." Not surprisingly, it has not remained well-known into our own century.
The same certainly cannot be said of the efforts of a rival sculptor, Vinnie Ream, whose early work was perhaps even less accomplished than Swayne’s. As a teenage student of the sculptor Clark Mills in Washington, she had made an almost unrecognizable bas-relief of Lincoln based on a photograph, but believed she would improve if only granted life sittings. Her parents’ influential friends obligingly wrote Lincoln on her behalf and he consented to sit, How much time he subsequently granted her is a matter of debate, Doubters say she saw him only long enough to take measurements and make sketches. But Vinnie always insisted that she had spent half-an-hour a day with Lincoln for five months, and claimed that once Lincoln even confided to her uncharacteristically that he liked her company because she reminded him of his late son, Willie.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Vinnie’s bust portrait of Lincoln reflected undeniable life experience with her subject. And it certainly did make her an overnight sensation. Photographers took and sold carte-de-visite portraits of the bust, and artists painted the girl sculptress" posing alongside her creation.
Then, in 1866, Vinnie entered a competition for a $10,000 Congressional Commission to create a full-length Lincoln statue for the Capitol Rotunda. Lincoln’s widow, Mary, protested violently, warning that nothing but a mortifying failure can be anticipated, which will be a severe trial to the Nation & the World." But Vinnie won the competition anyway, and sailed off to Rome to commence work on a statue in marble. At its unveiling in 1871, Vinnie had the last word — through her art. One critic, marveling at its "melancholy expressiveness," called it an extraordinary work for a child." The statue has remained a fixture in the Capitol Rotunda ever since.
The very last life portrait of Lincoln - exactly like the first - was a life mask, the work of Vinnie Ream's own teacher, Clark Mills. Made on February 11, 1865— a day before Lincoln’s 56th and final birthday. It achieved nowhere near the fame of Volk's effort five years earlier, but at least caused the subject no discomfort. Mills had invented a new process for making life masks, and all a subject needed to do to loosen it's grip from his face was to twitch his facial muscles ;the mask would then fall into pieces into a cloth, and Mills would later reassemble it as a whole. The result was never adapted into a sculpture, perhaps because it showed a Lincoln so ravaged by his brief time in office that viewers mistook it for a harrowing death mask.
Studying these two masks — Volk's 1860 casting and Mills’ effort of less than five years later — Lincoln’s White House aide John Hay made these poignant observations: "The first is of a man young for his years. The face has a clean, firm outline... the large mobile mouth (is) ready to speak, to shout, or laugh.. It is a face full of life, of energy, of vivid aspiration. The other is so sad and peaceful in its infinite repose... the mouth...fixed like that of an archaic statue; a look as one on whom sorrow and care had done their worst without victory is on all the features; the whole expression is of unspeakable sadness."
But the history of Lincoln sculpture and statuary hardly ended with the depressing results of that final sitting with Clark Mills. Quite the opposite. John Roger's mass-produced Council of War group in plaster became an immense best-seller and a fixture in American homes after the war. As for large, public sculpture, Thomas Ball’s imposing, once-admired, now politically incorrect Emancipation Group — showing Lincoln hovering with avuncular compassion over a half-naked, kneeling slave — was unveiled with much fanfare in Washington in 1876. Augustus Saint Gauden's powerful, contemplative bronze statue, Lincoln the Man, was installed in Lincoln Park in Chicago In 1887, inspiring fellow sculptor Lorado Taft to observe that "its majestic melancholy is beyond my power to describe...there is something almost human, or — shall I say? —superhuman about it." ‘Taft’s own fine sculpture was dedicated In Urbana, Illinois in 1927. And Gutzon Borglum’s intimate bronze of Lincoln seated on a bench has graced Newark, New Jersey since 1911 — inviting admirers to sit beside the Emancipator ever since.
The names of most other Lincoln sculptors — and, sadly,— their hundreds of works — have been largely forgotten: Charles Niehaus, Andrew O’Connor. and Frank Elwell. to name only three. Even Larkin Mead’s heroic statue of Lincoln for his tomb in Springfield. Illinois, paid for by public subscription, was admired only briefly. But still sculptors tried their hands, deprived of the living man, but determined to recreate him.
In our own century, two works of unsurpassed majesty did win critical and popular hearts alike, and have evolved into icons that summarize not only Lincoln’s standing in American history, but also the limitless possibilities of American creativity: Borglum’s massive granite head of Lincoln for his mountainside 1937 presidential gallery in Rapid City, South Dakota; and, of course, French’s great 1922 seated figure for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, which brought the Lincoln sculptural tradition full cycle — for there, gripping the arms of the massive chair on which he sits, are hands modeled after Volk’s 1860 life casts, enlarged to mythic proportions for the temple in which Lincoln’s memory is most often evoked in out own time.
