Existing comment:
Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865
Born Hodgenville, Kentucky
Abraham Lincoln was one of the first politicians to fully embrace portrait photography to advertise his candidacy; the Republican Party used a cut down image of Lincoln taken from Mathew Brady's 1860 photograph and placed in a small oval frame to create one of the first political campaign pins. However, the older print and lithographic techniques for duplicating and disseminating images were still in place: not only were they cheaper and easier to distribute than photographs, but also newspapers and journals still lacked the ability to print photographs. This lithograph is a composite, probably based on earlier images by printmaker Thomas Hicks and photographer Alexander Hesler; the lines in Lincoln's face that we can see in photographs have been smoothed out by the printmaker.
Leopold Grozelier, after Thomas Hicks, after Alexander Hesler, 1860 |