When it comes to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, there may be no more knowledgeable triumvirate than Harold Holzer, Gabor Boritt, and Mark Neely. The Lincoln Image is one of several books Holzer, sometimes alone and sometimes with others, has produced regarding imagery surrounding our 16th president. It doesn’t disappoint.
The current book was issued in 2001 by the University of Illinois Press, but it was originally published by Scribner’s in 1984 to accompany an exhibition at Gettysburg College. The volume focuses on prints produced in Lincoln’s lifetime and the months after his assassination. Photographs and paintings are sometimes provided because they were the basis for the prints derived from them, but the emphasis is on the prints themselves. As the authors document, some of the prints were of high visual quality while others were, well, not so much. Usually the printmakers, including well-known names such as Currier and Ives, John Sartain and others, along with many lesser-known artists, reworked original photographic images to “clean up” Lincoln’s appearance. For a man often described as homely or ugly, prints of Lincoln had the advantage over photographs by being able to “correct” his look. They could also recycle pre-presidency (aka, clean shaven) prints and photos into presidential prints by creatively adding a beard. Since many artists hadn’t actually seen Lincoln with a beard, this resulted in a variety of imagined looks.
The authors split the contents into three main sections reflecting periods of more intensive creation of Lincoln prints. The first is “Introducing a Rail Old Western Gentleman,” giving many in the country their first look at this largely unknown rail-splitter candidate from the west. In the second, “The Art of War,” Lincoln is viewed during his presidency, where his post-bearded visage needed to be reintroduced to Americans. The last section, “Apotheosis and Apocrypha,” includes many prints used to honor Lincoln after his assassination, often putting him together in print, and on an equal mythological level, with George Washington.
Prints of these three time periods were not just of Lincoln himself, but of family sittings (whether they occurred in reality or not), groupings of cabinet portraits, and scenes such as meeting with Native Americans. There are cartoons, dignified looks, and various renderings of that fateful event at Ford’s Theatre. The authors dig into the background of the prints and the sources from which they were derived, but also include ample discussion of the historical time period in which Lincoln lived. This was a time where carte-de-visites and prints were becoming affordable and widely popular with the general public. Most homes had some form of portraiture hanging on their walls, and the rapid growth of printing technology meant many of these wall hangings were prints of Lincoln. The authors have done an excellent job bringing these images to life.
Abraham Lincoln Bibliography Project 
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