Who Wore It Better? The Presidential Look

John Chester Buttre (American, 1821–1893). John Charles Frémont, ca. 1859. Engraving. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, LC-DIG-pga-00431

John Chester Buttre (American, 1821–1893). Abraham Lincoln, Second state. 1860. Engraving. Gift of Mr. Grosvenor Hyde Backus, Class of 1894, AC 1947.139

These two mid-nineteenth-century engravings look very similar. Abraham Lincoln, the beloved sixteenth president, and John C. Frémont, the first Republican presidential candidate, who later became senator from California, stand in identical poses, left hands on their hips and right hands resting on a document on the table beside them. They are shown wearing the same jacket, trousers, and shoes, in what seems to be the very same room, with identical furnishings. Even the same books lean against the chair’s leg.

Both prints are the work of John Chester Buttre, a well-known publisher and engraver based in New York. Buttre recycled the plate he had used for Frémont’s portrait to produce Lincoln’s when Lincoln received the Republican Party’s endorsement in May 1860. The most significant alteration, of course, is the replacement of Frémont’s head with Lincoln’s, evidence of which is seen in the lighter region that surrounds Lincoln’s head like a halo. Other minor details are changed as well: the large world globe that stands on the table in Frémont’s portrait, recalling his life as an explorer before he entered politics, is replaced by a small lamp in Lincoln’s, and Lincoln’s smaller tie, revealing more of his collar, replaces the larger cravat around Frémont’s neck. Interestingly, the photographer Matthew Brady, in his photograph of Lincoln from February 1860 that likely served as the model for this engraving, enlarged Lincoln’s collar to make his neck appear less scrawny. Lincoln is reported to have said that “Brady and the Cooper Institute [where he delivered his famous Cooper Union address] made me president.”

Lincoln’s portrait underwent another interesting metamorphosis in the printer’s studio. There’s a third, nearly identical print — also by Buttre and in the Mead’s collection — in which Lincoln is portrayed wearing a beard. Lincoln did in fact grow a beard, inspired — at least partly — by the words of an eleven-year-old girl named Grace Bedell, who, in the fall of 1860, wrote him a letter saying not only would his thin face be improved with a beard, but that “[a]ll the ladies like whiskers.” When he returned to Grace’s town in February of 1861, Lincoln bore his now-iconic beard.

John Chester Buttre (American, 1821–1893). Abraham Lincoln. Third State. 1860–1861. Engraving. Gift of Herbert L. Pratt, Jr., AC 1945.490

Written by Rosemary Frehe, Class of 2017, and Fawzi Itani, Class of 2018

Robert S. Duncanson: Nineteenth-Century African American Landscape Painter

Robert S. Duncanson (American, 1821–1872), Maiden’s Rock, Lake Pepin, 1862. Oil on canvas. Gift of William MacBeth, Inc, AC 1950.8

In Robert Duncanson’s painting Maiden’s Rock, Lake Pepin, a sailboat glides over white-capped waves, between towering rock formations and under a sky tinged with pink and filled with white clouds. The serenity of this scene derives from Duncanson’s use of muted colors and his soft, visible brushstrokes. The sense of calm and focus on natural beauty are features of almost all of Duncanson’s work. In 1862, the Cincinnati Gazette called Duncanson the “best landscape painter in the West” (Oxford Art Online). Duncanson was a rarity in the nineteenth century as a successful African American painter who achieved international recognition.

Robert S. Duncanson (1821–1872). Wikimedia Commons

A descendant of freed slaves from Virginia, Duncanson grew up in Michigan and was trained in house painting and carpentry, both family trades. While some sources claimed he was of Scottish descent, recent scholarship has determined that he had a multiracial background, and that his great-grandfather was likely a plantation owner. In 1841 Duncanson moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, considered the “Athens of the West,” to pursue art as a career. He taught himself to paint and began working with Hudson River School artists such as William Sonntag. Soon, Duncanson’s patrons included white abolitionists and prominent citizens who supported African American artists. One such patron, the wealthy horticulturalist Nicholas Longworth, hired Duncanson to paint eight landscape murals in his Cincinnati mansion. Joseph D. Ketner, author of a book about Duncanson called The Emergence of the African-American Artist (1994), called the murals “the most ambitious and accomplished domestic mural paintings in antebellum America.” With his success, Duncanson was able to travel to Europe in 1853 to study the great masters.

Robert Duncanson, The Land of the Lotus Eaters, 1861. Swedish Royal Collection, Stockholm. Wikimedia Commons

Although most of Duncanson’s paintings show no signs of racial tension or antislavery views, the artist was involved in the abolitionist movement in Cincinnati and produced paintings for the antislavery presentation Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States. His most acclaimed work, The Land of the Lotus Eaters (1861), shows European influence in both subject and style, but there are also subtle references to slavery in the United States in the depiction of white soldiers being served by men with darker skin. Around 1863, while the Civil War was being fought at home, Duncanson traveled to Canada and then Europe. In Canada he helped develop and influence a community of artists, before leaving for Europe in 1865 to exhibit The Land of the Lotus Eaters. In Great Britain and other countries aristocrats and royals alike received the work with great praise, including the king of Sweden. The painting is now part of the Swedish Royal Collection in Stockholm.

The Mead acquired Duncanson’s 1862 work Maiden’s Rock, Lake Pepin in 1950 through the art historian and dealer Robert McIntyre, who was president and director of the Macbeth Gallery, owned by his uncle William Macbeth, in New York. The work is a skillful and expressive representation of the beauty of the natural world. Lake Pepin is a widening of the Mississippi River located about sixty miles south of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and a glimpse of the river can be seen stretching beyond the cliff on the left. Duncanson’s painting is part of the Mead’s well-established collection of nineteenth-century American landscape paintings, which includes works by Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Asher Brown Durand. Recognition of Duncanson as part of this significant group of American artists has grown in recent years, and both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have Duncanson landscapes currently on view. (Click here to see the Metropolitan’s Duncanson, and here to see the MFA’s.)

Duncanson’s career is not easily categorized – he is both an important American landscape painter and a rare example of an African American artist who succeeded as a painter at a time when the profession was dominated by white men. The MFA Boston identifies Duncanson along with Grafton Tyler Brown (1841–1918) and Edward Mitchell Bannister (1833–1901) as the three African American painters who “achieve[d] . . . popular success in the nineteenth century” (Boston MFA).

Written by Catherine Rose O’Brien, Class of 2017