THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY is currently displaying a remarkable portrait of Abraham Lincoln.The nine-foot-tall portrait by W.F.K. Travers, done from life in 1864-1865, is one of only three known full-length paintings of Lincoln. For decades, it hung in relative obscurity in the Madison, NJ, town hall. Art collector and benefactor Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge established the Hartley Dodge Foundation in the early 20th century and filled the municipal building with her collection. She added the Travers portrait to the walls of the town hall  “after Congress dithered over its purchase for the Capitol” in the 1920s.

On loan to the Portrait Gallery for five years, the Travers portrait has been newly restored and will be  a highlight of the museum’s “America’s Presidents” gallery. Museum director Kim Sajet noted that the painting will be reunited with Gilbert Stuart’s renowned Lansdowne portrait of George Washington “roughly 147 years after the two paintings were first displayed together at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition on Presidents” in Philadelphia.  Sajet also explained that Lincoln had personal connections to the Portrait Gallery building: the building was originally the U.S. Patent Office, and Lincoln had once applied for and received a patent for a boat floatation device intended to free boats from sandbars. The Patent Office Building was also the site of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Ball, held a month before his death in 1865.  (See Amy Henderson, “If Only Hollywood Would Show Us Lincoln’s Second Inaugural,” Smithsonian Magazine,  January 15, 2013.)

What strikes the viewer when walking toward the Travers portrait of Lincoln is how lifelike it seems—so different from other depictions of Lincoln that have him sitting stiffly and looking somber or otherwise-engaged. It is thought he sat for Travers in the Fall of 1864, with the artist finishing the painting after Lincoln’s death. What Travers conveyed was Lincoln with a relaxed expression, with a sparkle in his eye and the hint of a smile on his lips.  One of his close friends and bodyguard, Ward H. Lamon, wrote in 1888 that the painting was “the most lifelike picture of Mr. Lincoln I have ever seen on canvas.”  It has “the real likeness of the man, with his rugged features and irregularities of personal appearance, true to life.”  

We believe W.F.K. Travers was a Dutch artist, but little is known about him except that he traveled widely and lived around the world. He came to the United States in 1862, and according to Lincoln biographer Ted Widmer, attempted to join the Union Army. He was reputedly rejected for a medical condition—although Widmer explains this has not been substantiated.  There is also a story that Travers met Lincoln on a Washington street and offered to paint his portrait as his contribution to the war effort, and Lincoln agreed.  Alas, there are no extant journals or notebooks kept by Travers, so we don’t know for sure even when Lincoln sat for him—if in the Fall of 1864, was it before the election? After? Or was it perhaps even closer to his inauguration in March 1865?   What is known is that Travers was in Germany when Lincoln was assassinated, and completed the portrait there.  He soon sold it to an American diplomat living in Frankfurt.

“The Travers portrait of Lincoln has succeeded in capturing this lifelike quality. Visitors to the National Portrait Gallery crowd around the enormous painting with a sense of awe—“Did he just move?” one viewer asked another while I was there.”

The painting’s next appearance was in the 1876 Centennial exposition in Philadelphia, where–as legend has it—the president’s widow Mary Todd Lincoln “was so overcome by its lifelike appearance that she fainted and was carried out of the hall.”  Next, the portrait hung in the U.S. Capitol while Congress debated whether to purchase it. Ted Widmer says that the painting became “kind of an orphan around Washington…..It hung in a hotel window. It was in a naval subcommittee room inside the U.S. Capitol,” but Congress couldn’t agree on a price, and “it just sat there, decade after decade.” Because this debate was never resolved, the Rockefeller family bought the portrait in the 1920s. Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge (Left. Collection, North jersey Historical and Geneology Center) built the town hall in Madison, N.J., filled it with art, and donated the hall and the Lincoln portrait to the town in 1935. The Hartley Dodge Foundation still maintains the building and its art.

As Lincoln biographer Ted Widmer has written, the Lincoln portrait was “hiding in plain sight where it was seen by very few Americans outside the townspeople who filed past it on their way to pay parking tickets and water bills.”  Then, in 2017, a part-time archivist discovered a marble bust of Napoleon in the corner of the meeting hall–as it turned out, the sculpture was by Auguste Rodin. At that point, the Hartley Dodge Foundation began to reassess all of the art, with one of the results being the loan of the Travers Lincoln portrait to the National Portrait Gallery. 

There are several symbols in the Travers painting: Lincoln is portrayed standing in front of a bust of George Washington and a rendering of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze; Lincoln’s hand rests on a copy of the Constitution next to a scroll bearing a draft of the 13th Amendment, which was passed in January 1865. The globe in the background is positioned on Haiti, which Lincoln recognized as an independent nation in 1862. The President’s top hat and gloves are draped on a chair, with one glove on the floor. When Lincoln wore his top hat, he would’ve been over 7 feet tall!

Above right: Leonard Volk, Lincoln, 1860, Plaster life mask, 1917 cast after 1860 original. Coll: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Nine feet tall and six feet wide, this vast Lincoln portrait gives viewers a full sense not only of Lincoln’s height, but of his presence. The painting has an eerie ability to convey Lincoln emerging from the canvas and moving toward you with a welcoming gesture.

The lifelike quality of this Lincoln image reminded me of how interested Lincoln himself was in promoting “the image” of public servants in American life: few Americans knew what their presidents looked like until the advent of photography in the1840s. There were popular drawings of Washington, but few publications to distribute them widely. Outside of his family and circle of friends, who knew what James Madison looked like?

Lincoln, while admitting his countenance was far from handsome, made a continuing effort to sit for photographers and portrait artists. He wanted people to know what he looked like, homely or not, and ultimately became the most photographed American of the 19th century. The earliest likeness we have of him is from a daguerreotype taken at Springfield in 1846, and photographers marked every significant moment in his life thereafter. He gave Mathew Brady’s photographs of him during the 1860 campaign full credit for his election, once saying that Brady “made me President.”

Even amidst the Civil War, he sat for photographers like Alexander Gardner. In Gardner’s “cracked plate” photograph–also on display at the Portrait Gallery—Lincoln has just celebrated his 56th birthday, but looks war-weary and much older. Poet Walt Whitman described Lincoln’s face  as “so awful ugly it becomes beautiful,” but with qualities as hard to capture as “a wild perfume or a fruit-taste.”  He hoped a painter would one day catch the inner power of Lincoln’s “eyes, mouth, expression.”

Above left: Alexander Gardner, Abraham Lincoln (1865) albumen silver print, image dimension: 17 11/16 x 15 3/16″. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Frederick Hill Meserve Collection

The Travers portrait of Lincoln has succeeded in capturing this lifelike quality. Visitors to the National Portrait Gallery crowd around the enormous painting with a sense of awe—“Did he just move?” one viewer asked another while I was there.

In addition to the newly-installed Lincoln portrait, the “America’s Presidents” exhibition will offer tactile casts of Lincoln’s face and hands in 3D printed copies that visitors can touch: one is a face mask by Leonard Volk, and another a face mask and set of two hands by Clark Mills. These objects are placed next to glass-enclosed plaster casts made in 1917 and based on the original works by Volk (1860) and Mills (1865).

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor                         

FYI, Author’s Note, below: text panels from the NPG collection:

“Yes. This is he.” The noted midcentury sculptor Leonard Volk took this life mask of Lincoln before he started his run for the presidency. Volk wanted to make a bust of Lincoln to add to his collection of American statesmen, but he realized that Lincoln did not have time to sit. Hence he created this life mask, which shows the future president without a beard, and a face whose smoothness contrasts decidedly with the Clark Mills’s lined and furrowed mask of 1865. Poet Richard Watson Gilder wrote after Lincoln’s assassination, “The mask doeth keep the very form and mold/Of our great martyr’s face. “Yes. This is he.”

In February of 1865, just two months before Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Alexander Gardner created this “cracked-plate” portrait, now considered one of the most important and evocative photographs in American history. Aside from the detail in the center of Lincoln’s face, much of the picture appears diffused or out of focus. Deep, dark grooves in Lincoln’s skin may evoke his weariness at the end of the Civil War, but he also exhibits a slight smile—perhaps a sign of relief as the restoration of the Union draws near. Lincoln had looked forward to continuing his presidency but was assassinated only weeks after beginning his second term. At some point, possibly when the glass-plate negative was heated to receive a coat of varnish, a crack appeared in the upper half of Gardner’s plate. He made a single print and then discarded the damaged plate, so only one such portrait exists.