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Hon. Abraham Lincoln, Republican Candidate for Sixteenth President of the United States.
New York: Currier & Ives, 152 Nassau St., 1860. Lithograph, 14” x 9” plus margins. CONDITION: Very good, light marginal soiling and small stains. A campaign lithograph of a beardless Lincoln, published during his first run for the presidency in 1860. One of the most sought after Lincoln likenesses, this half-length portrait of the future President—after the Mathew Brady photograph known as the Cooper Union portrait—shows the young candidate in a black waistcoat, jacket, and cravat, looking directly ahead. It is one of seven portraits of Lincoln published by Currier & Ives during the 1860 election, and was “advertised in a period sales circular at 20 cents apiece, six for a dollar. In 1934 a jury of noted print collectors selected this print thirty-fourth among the ‘best 50’ of all small folio Currier & Ives prints” (Holzer). Currier & Ives were instrumental in making Lincoln a household face, though this—like so many other portraits—softens and refines his features. Lincoln’s facsimile signature appears just below the portrait. Lincoln waited until after the election to grow his beard, but the idea may have come from eleven-year-old Grace Bedell, who wrote to him on October 15th, 1860, that: “I have yet got four brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President” (“Whiskers for Votes”). OCLC records holdings at the Clements Library and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as possibly the Lincoln Memorial University Library (it is unclear whether the record is for this print or another 1860 Currier & Ives portrait of Lincoln with the same title). We also locate examples at the Library of Congress and the University of Delaware. REFERENCES: Holzer, Harold, Gabor S. Boritt, Mark E. Neely Jr. The Lincoln Image : Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (U of Illinois Press, 1984), p. 30; “Whisker for Votes, or Why Abraham Lincoln Grew a Beard” at Indiana State Museum online.
Item #8066
Price: $1,500.00
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