Mary Lincoln Extra Credit Questions

[ReignetteC]

(08-20-2015 06:53 PM)L Verge Wrote:  

(08-20-2015 06:35 PM)Anita Wrote:  Yes indeed Laurie! Good detective work. Your link is fascinating. I didn't see that one.


“Pendel looked very much like Lincoln and this fact must have given the Chief Executive much amusement, especially when the doorkeeper was mistaken for the President,” wrote Lincoln scholar Louis A Warren. “Governor Andrews of Massachusetts wrote a letter to Mrs. Lincoln asking her to urge William Morris Hunt, the famous Boston artist, to make a portrait of the President. Mrs. Lincoln later sent Pendel on to Boston where he posed for the artist in Lincoln’s clothes, as the portrait was to be one of full length.”2
http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/insi...ubjectID=2


Portrait of Abraham Lincoln by the Boston artist William Morris Hunt, oil on panel. The full-length portrait was a study for a later painting of Lincoln by Hunt which was destroyed in the Boston fire of 1872. The portrait was painted soon after the assassination of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. The work portrays Lincoln as a sad-faced martyr to the Union cause, which was supported by William Morris Hunt and his brothers.
Date 1865 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:..._Hunt.jpeg

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Here's Thomas Frances Pendel. He does resemble Lincoln.




http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/39320

Thanks for posting the photo of Pendel because I was doubting the reference in the source that I read to Pendel being the "Black Doorkeeper at the White House." Pendel is mentioned in so many references to the assassination, but I never remember any noting of his race.

In Governor Andrews's May 12, 1865 letter to Mrs. Lincoln, in which he requested-on behalf of William Morris Hunt-the late president's "articles" (suit), he wrote, "I am sure any portrait of President Lincoln from his [Hunt's] hand would rank among the best works of art."

Lincoln's black suit survived the fire and Hunt's widow donated it to the Smithsonian in 1894.

Mary Lincoln also sent a suit of clothes to the artist Matthew Wilson. That suit is in Ford's Theatre.