FHGTHE LAST FORMAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT of Abraham Lincoln was taken in February 1865, a time of promise and renewal for the president. Buoyed by his reelection, recent Union Army advances, and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, he could begin to contemplate the war’s end. The next four years would be about bringing the nation back together. As he well knew, that would be no small task, but far less horrific than war.
On February 5, one week before his fifty-sixth birthday, Lincoln and his son Tad entered the Pennsylvania Avenue studio of Alexander Gardner, who had portrayed Lincoln on at least four previous occasions. There father and son sat for several photographs. With the inauguration a month away, Lincoln wanted new portraits that might be used to usher in his second term.
As Gardner was completing the development of the glass-plate negative for this portrait—the largest made on that occasion—a crack suddenly materialized in the negative. Before discarding it, Gardner produced this one print (opposite), the crack clearly visible running through the top of Lincoln’s head.
In Gardner’s portrait, produced just two months before the assassination of the president, one sees the physical toll that four years of war had taken on Lincoln. Yet he wears a slight smile and a look of quiet confidence, suggestive of his sense of hope at this moment. FHG
LAST LOOK This photograph by Alexander Gardner, held at the National Portrait Gallery, captures Abraham Lincoln in his last months. Late in Lincoln’s presidency, Horace Greeley observed that his face looked “care-ploughed, tempest-tossed, and weatherbeaten.”
