Description:

Lincoln Abraham



Abraham Lincoln, Leonard Volk Life Mask from Holzer Collection

 

This modern plaster casting of the 1860 Volk hand cast of Abraham Lincoln was owned by prominent Lincolniana Collector Harold Holzer.

 

[ABRAHAM LINCOLN.] “Replica Life Hand Cast of Abraham Lincoln,” by Leonard Wells Volk. Hinsdale, Illinois: American Treasures Foundation, c. 2000. X" x X" x X".

 

Historical Background

In the spring of 1860, sculptor Leonard Wells Volk (1828-1895) asked Lincoln to sit for a bust. The artist began by doing a life mask, and Lincoln found the process of letting wet plaster dry on his face “anything but agreeable.” Volk had opened a studio in St. Louis in 1848 and married a cousin of Stephen A. Douglas. With Douglas’s assistance, Volk studied in Rome for two years in the mid-1850s, then settled in Chicago.

 

After making the life mask in early April, Volk traveled to Springfield in mid-May to make casts of Lincoln’s hands. On Friday, May 18, the Republican National Convention in Chicago nominated Lincoln as its candidate for the Presidency. Two days later, Volk arrived at Lincoln’s home. He wanted Lincoln to hold something in his right hand, and Lincoln went to the woodshed and returned with a sawed-off piece of a broom handle. After Volk cast Lincoln’s right hand, Volk turned to Lincoln’s left hand. Lincoln told Volk that he had heard him called a rail-splitter. “Well, it is true that I did split rails,” Lincoln continued, “and one day while I was sharpening a wedge on a log, the axe glanced and nearly took my thumb off, and there is the scar, you see.”

 

Volk used the life mask and hand casts for later works, and other artists such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French studied them for their own sculptures of Lincoln.

 

Provenance: This piece is from the collection of Harold Holzer (b. 1949), a prominent Lincoln scholar and collector of Lincolniana. He is the author or editor of fifty-two books, most on Abraham Lincoln, and specializes in representations of Lincoln in visual culture. Holzer was senior vice president for public affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1992 to 2015 and served as co-chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission from 2000 to 2010.

 

 


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