Description:

Lincoln Robert



Robert Todd Lincoln’s Check to Tiffany & Co. from Holzer Collection

 

This check by Robert Todd Lincoln to Tiffany & Company was owned by prominent Lincolniana Collector Harold Holzer.

 

The Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company Check to Tiffany & Co. for $2.50, October 4, 1917.  7.5" x 2.5".

 

Historical Background


Robert Todd Lincoln (1843-1926) was the oldest son of Abraham and Mary Lincoln and the only of their four sons to live past the age of 19. After his father’s death, Robert Todd Lincoln supported his mother and younger brother Tad, but Tad’s death in 1871 left their mother devastated. In 1875, he arranged to have her committed to a private psychiatric hospital in Batavia, Illinois, but after several months there, she arranged to go and live with her sister in Springfield. She never fully reconciled with her son.

 

Meanwhile, Harvard-educated Robert Todd Lincoln completed his legal studies in Chicago and began a thriving law practice in 1867. He also became active in Republican politics. He served as Secretary of War from 1881 to 1885, under Presidents James A. Garfield and his successor Chester A. Arthur. From 1889 to 1893, he was the U.S. Minister to the United Kingdom in the administration of Benjamin Harrison. From 1911 to 1922, Lincoln served as chairman of the board of the Pullman Palace Car Company, of which he had been president from 1897 to 1911.

 

Established as the Farmers Life Insurance & Loan Company in 1822, the institution became Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company in 1836. The company eventually became Citibank of New York in the twentieth century.

 

At age 74, Lincoln made out this check for $2.50 to Tiffany & Company, which had provided jewelry for his mother when she was First Lady more than fifty years earlier. On the same day, Lincoln made out a separate check for $3 to the American Golfer, Inc., reflecting his passion as a golfer.

 

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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