A painting of Abraham Lincoln so lifelike it was said to have made Mary Lincoln faint when she first set eyes on it at an exhibition in 1876 is now on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The 9-foot painting shows Lincoln at his full 6-foot-4 height, and those who knew him said it was the most realistic image of him they had ever seen, the Washington Post reports. While plenty of black-and-white photos of Lincoln exist, he sits “stiffly and somberly” in them and the color painting of a relaxed Lincoln “offers viewers perhaps the best opportunity today to see Lincoln as he really was,” the Post notes.
Lincoln sat for the portrait in 1864. Artist WFK Travers completed it the following year, soon after the president was assassinated. It “presents a real likeness of the man, with his rugged features and irregularities of personal appearance, true to life,” Ward Lamon, a close friend of Lincoln’s, wrote in 1888. Travers sold the painting to an American diplomat and it hung in the Capitol for years. It was bought by the Rockefeller family in the 1930s and ended up in a municipal building in Madison, New Jersey, for almost a century. It 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,” Ted Widmer wrote in the Post last year.
I don’t much care for going to DC, but I may have to wander up there to see that.
Oh no. it’s going to cause one of our favorite posters, Uncle Al, to faint as well.
Looks quite different than any photo or painting I ever saw of him.
@Fritz — Nah. I only get the vapors over inherently dishonest Lincoln hagiography.
…Might be smart to visit it before the looney leftists destroy it.
Though, you don’t want to get in the way of someone that wants to change history.
When will the Obama portrait of him picking his nose be revealed?
htt ps://www.pinterest.com/debbiallen/booger-eating/
Tell the Looney Left that defacing the portrait of Lincoln would be antisemitic.
After all he was our first Jewish President.
Don’t believe me… his first name was Abe and he wuz shot in the temple!
(hey – they’d be all over Snopes to figger that one out!)