A surprising influence on Obama’s portrait: Abraham Lincoln

[David Lockmiller]

(02-14-2018 08:18 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Is the WP author's take on the painting the same as the artist's intention?

Healy's painting is one of my favorites, too. David,

I agree with your comment. Why not just ask the artist what were his intentions?

Eva Elisabeth, I was referring to Healy's 1868 painting, The Peacemakers. Wow, what a moment in time that was for the painting with Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Porter just before the "Appomattox" campaign. Four years of war and the end was coming!

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The Peacemakers is an 1868 painting by George P.A. Healy. It depicts the historic March 28, 1865, strategy session by the Union high command on the steamer River Queen during the final days of the American Civil War.

In March 1865, General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant invited President Lincoln to visit his headquarters at City Point, Virginia. By coincidence, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman (then campaigning in North Carolina) happened to visit City Point at the same time. This allowed for the war's only three-way meeting of President Lincoln, General Grant, and General Sherman. Also present was Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter.

The artist was not present at the meeting near Richmond. However, he had previously painted individual portraits of the four men and he had obtained the data from which he worked from General Sherman. In a November 28, 1872 letter to Isaac Newton Arnold, General Sherman wrote:

In Chicago about June or July of that year, when all the facts were fresh in my mind, I told them to George P. A. Healy, the artist, who was casting about for a subject for an historical painting, and he adopted this interview. Mr. Lincoln was then dead, but Healy had a portrait, which he himself had made at Springfield some five or six years before. With this portrait, some existing photographs, and the strong resemblance in form of [Leonard Swett], of Chicago, to Mr. Lincoln he made the picture of Mr. Lincoln seen in this group. For General Grant, Admiral Porter, and myself he had actual sittings, and I am satisfied the four portraits in this group of Healy's are the best extant.

Healy afterwards, in Rome, painted ten smaller copies, about eighteen by twenty-four inches, one of which I now have, and it is now within view. I think the likeness of Mr. Lincoln by far the best of the many I have seen elsewhere, and those of General Grant, Admiral Porter, and myself equally good and faithful. I think Admiral Porter gave Healy a written description of our relative positions in that interview, also the dimensions, shape, and furniture of the cabin of the "Ocean Queen"; but the rainbow is Healy's—typical, of course, of the coming peace.

In this picture I seem to be talking, the others attentively listening. Whether Healy made this combination from Admiral Porter's letter or not, I cannot say; but I thought that he caught the idea from what I told him had occurred when saying that "if Lee would only remain in Richmond till I could reach Burkesville, we would have him between our thumb and fingers," suiting the action to the word. It matters little what Healy meant by his historic group, but it is certain that we four sat pretty much as represented, and were engaged in an important conversation during the forenoon of March 28, 1865, and that we parted never to meet again.

The pose of Lincoln inspired Healy's 1869 portrait, Abraham Lincoln. Robert Todd Lincoln considered the likeness of his father in this painting to be the "most excellent in existence."

The original version of the painting was destroyed by the Calumet club fire in 1893. A second copy was discovered in 1922, after lying unnoticed in a family storeroom in Chicago for fifty years. The acquisition of the painting was made by the Truman White House in 1947.

(Source: Wikipedia)