lINCOLN pORTRAIT AND mRS lINCOLN

[David Lockmiller]

(06-23-2025 07:26 PM)observer Wrote:  https://www.loc.gov/resource/lprbscsm.scsm0646/

https://npg.si.edu/exhibition/abraham-li...fk-travers

https://www.newser.com/story/331446/this...faint.html

A story exists about a portrait of Abraham Lincoln painted by a Dutch artist, W.F.K. Travers, that caused Mary Todd Lincoln to faint.

The Washington Post reported in 2023:

Ward H. Lamon, a close friend and bodyguard, wrote in 1888 that the painting was “the most lifelike picture of Mr. Lincoln I have ever seen on canvas.”

What is known is that Lincoln sat for Travers in 1864, and that Travers completed the oil painting in Germany shortly after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. He soon sold it to an American diplomat living in Frankfurt.

In 1876, the painting popped up at an exposition in Philadelphia, where, as one legend goes, Mary Lincoln “was so overcome by its lifelike appearance that she fainted and was carried out of the hall.”

For years, it hung in the U.S. Capitol while Congress debated whether to purchase the canvas, until it was finally sold to the Rockefeller family.

In 2017, a part-time archivist discovered that a marble bust of Napoleon sitting in the corner of the borough council room had been sculpted by Auguste Rodin, prompting the foundation to reassess all of the art in its collection. The loan of the Lincoln portrait to the National Portrait Gallery is part of that reassessment.

In addition to Lincoln’s likeness, the painting is filled with symbols noting the president’s place in history. He stands in front of a bust of George Washington and a rendering of the painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze, one of the most famous images in the world in the mid-1800s. Lincoln’s hand rests on a bound copy of the Constitution, next to a scroll bearing a draft of the 13th Amendment. Behind the scroll is a small statue of an African American man rising as he pulls the chains from his body.