(Abraham Lincoln)
Lot Closed
January 21, 04:26 PM GMT
Estimate
4,000 - 6,000 USD
Lot Details
Description
(Abraham Lincoln)
George Sumner, autograph letter signed ("Geo. Sumner") to Thomas Hicks, enthusiastically endorsing Hicks's plan to paint Abraham Lincoln's portrait
4 pages (8 x 5 in.) on a bifolium of wove paper, Boston, 14 June 1860; fold creases, final page lightly discolored.
Portrait of presidential candidate Lincoln as a "young and handsome man."
Less than a month after the nascent Republican party nominated Abraham Lincoln at Chicago's Wigwam as its second standard-bearer, political economist George Sumner congratulates portraitist Thomas Hicks on his plans to paint Lincoln—and provides a vivid prose portrait of the nominee himself:
"I am delighted with the thought that you are to paint 'Old Abe'—Abe the calumniated—for he has been called old and plain, when he is, as you will find, young and handsome!
"This frightful daguerreotype which is now going the rounds, must have been taken in a moment of fatigue, when all that gives character to the face, was in repose.
"I wish you could have seen him, as I saw him last February in Jacksonville [Illinois], when his large, liquid eye, slowly moving in its orbit, suddenly lighted up, in response to a bright thought in his brain, and gave a flash which, had I been a woman, would have transfixed me.
"Now, my dear fellow, can you not combine these two expressions—the one of thoughtful sadness, the other of brilliancy and force? It is a hard task I know, for only a large soul can catch the fugitive flash of another, but I will answer for you that you can do it.
"And if you do it, I will say—what?—that you are a great artist I have said already—I will say more—that you are a true Republican—and grateful millions shall respond, Amen!"
Thomas Hicks was the first artist to paint Lincoln as a Presidential candidate: "In 1860 after the nomination at Chicago, Mr. [William] Schaus, the art publisher of New York, sent me to Springfield, Illinois to paint a portrait of Mr. Lincoln to be published for the campaign of that year" (quoted in Holzer, Boritt and Neely, The Lincoln Image, p.45). The portrait of the still-cleanshaven Lincoln was widely circulated through the engraving published by Schaus. The likeness was endorsed by Mrs. Lincoln, Lincoln's friends, and, supposedly, Lincoln himself. Hicks's painting is now at the Chicago Historical Society.