Image
For this campaign portrait in the presidential election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln (1809—1865) is shown seated and posed in a three-quarter view. His dignified pose, straight back, and steady stare offer an image of a firm and honest leader. His expression is serious and thoughtful. Lincoln would have other portraits taken before his election in November 1860, but these quickly diminished in popularity as fresh images with his newly grown beard were in demand.
Technique
This photograph was made using the collodion on glass (wet-plate) process, popular in commercial photography for its ability to capture fine detail. In this process, a piece of glass was coated with photosensitive material, exposed while still wet, and then contact-printed onto photosensitive paper. Salted photographic paper was used here, although it was somewhat outmoded after 1855, when albumen paper had become more popular. (For more on the collodion on glass process, see the Alinari Brothers' Campanile, Pisa. For more on salted paper prints, see Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard's Hayloft & Courtyard.)
Context
This photo was taken on June 3, 1860, two weeks after Abraham Lincoln won the Republican Party's nomination for president. This was not Lincoln's first experience as a photographic subject; he had daguerreotypes taken as early as 1846. However, Lincoln was the first American president to use photography as a campaign tool. He was one of the most photographed presidents of the nineteenth century, with 127 portraits made before his untimely death. Photographs of Lincoln were reproduced as cartes de visite—small portraits of famous people or loved ones—or modified by printmakers as woodcut engravings for magazines, newspapers, and campaign posters. (For more on cartes de visite, see André Adolphe Eugène Disdéri's Self-Portrait.) Lincoln credited a widely reproduced photograph taken by Mathew Brady in February 1860 as partly responsible for his election.
Alexander Hesler was a popular Chicago photographer who had previously photographed Lincoln in 1857. For the general election, Hesler also distributed a photograph of Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party nominee for president. Because Douglas in his photograph was considered to appear much more handsome than the somewhat disheveled Lincoln, the Republican Party asked Hesler to suppress the photograph. In response, Hesler wrote to Lincoln, asking him to come to Chicago for another sitting. In June 1860, a more carefully groomed Lincoln sat for four poses, including the one seen here. Hesler retouched the plates carefully and two were reproduced in upwards of a hundred thousand copies during the campaign. Said Lincoln of his portrait, "[It] looks like and expresses me better than any I have ever seen; if it pleases the people I am satisfied."
