Just in time for Lincoln’s birthday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art* has aquired its first major image of the president — a rare and beautiful piece with a distinguished provenance to boot.
The bronze piece by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, is one of only 16 known casts of the image, Abraham Lincoln, the Man (Standing Lincoln). Measuring 40 1/2 inches tall, it’s an authorized reduction of the large bronze monument that Saint-Gaudens created for Lincoln Park in Chicago between 1884 and 1887. It dates to 1911, the Met believes.
According to the Met, Saint Gaudens (1848-1907) planned and authorized the limited number of castings, and the terms of his estate alloed Tiffany Studios and Gorham Manufacturing Co. to make them under the supervision of his own mold makers, founders, and studio assistants. His widow later sold the castings for museum, library, and domestic display. The Met’s says its version was likely one of the first two statuettes to be completed.
Here’s the provenance story:
The magnificently preserved cast was originally in the collection of Clara Stone Hay, the widow of President Abraham Lincoln’s onetime assistant private secretary, John M. Hay, who went on to co-author a 10-volume biography of Lincoln for the Century Company in the 1880s, and later served as U. S. Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Hay, who called Lincoln “The Tycoon,†kept a diary during his years on the staff of the White House (where he also lived from 1861 to 1865), considered by scholars as the most important source of first-hand recollections of the Lincoln Administration. During the “Great Secession Winter†of 1860-1861, and on through the Civil War, Hay also wrote pseudonymous newspaper articles supporting the President-elect, later the President—a common practice of the day.
The Met bought it from a private collector whose family has owned it since 1943.
This acquisition happens at a great moment, as the Met has recently reopened its renovated and reinstalled American paintings galleries — where this piece will go, in the gallery devoted to the Civil War and its aftermath. It joins more than 50 other works in the collection by Saint-Gaudens, but it’s the only major representation of Lincoln in the collection. Unlike George Washington, who’s represented in several major pieces.
For Lincoln fans, I will cite more from the Met, because the press release is not yet on the website and I can’t link to it.
The original bronze was dedicated in Lincoln Park, Chicago on October 22, 1887, in a setting designed by Stanford White. The statue was officially unveiled by Abraham Lincoln II, the President’s 14-year-old grandson and namesake, who would live only another three years. The dedicatory address was offered by Leonard Swett, a leading Illinois attorney who had ridden the judicial circuit with then-lawyer Abraham Lincoln for 11 years. Swett proclaimed that the statue revealed more of the man he knew than any sculpture he had ever beheld.
A replica was later created for Parliament Square in the shadows of Westminster Abbey, and presented to the British people in 1914 by the American National Committee for the Celebration of the Centenary of the Treaty of Ghent. An entirely different statue was originally designed for the prestigious site, but Lincoln’s son, Robert T. Lincoln (a close friend of John Hay’s), intervened and urged that the Saint-Gaudens sculpture be cast for London instead.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met
*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met
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