HRRIN APRIL 1860 CHICAGO SCULPTOR LEONARD W. VOLK learned that Abraham Lincoln was trying a prolonged court case in that city and invited the prominent lawyer and politician to sit for him. The two had met earlier in 1858 during the heated Lincoln-Douglas senatorial debates. Volk was then working on a statue of Stephen Douglas and asked to portray his opponent as well. Lincoln agreed but was too busy to fulfill Volk’s request. Now in 1860, with Lincoln emerging as a Republican presidential prospect, Volk once again broached the topic. Lincoln, who often sought opportunities to be photographed at key moments in his life, made time to be immortalized by one of the city’s leading artists.
For a week in April, Lincoln arrived at the sculptor’s studio first thing in the morning and left before the court opened and the trial resumed. On the second day, to aid his work on the sculpture, Volk made a mold of Lincoln’s face by applying wet plaster and prying it loose when it dried—a procedure Lincoln found “anything but agreeable.” From that mold the artist produced an evocative plaster cast of Lincoln’s face, pictured opposite and on the following pages from various angles. This life mask captured Lincoln as he looked when he rose to prominence on the national stage, with every line and wrinkle on his face recorded. Later when Volk presented Lincoln with a copy of the final bust, he remarked wryly, “There is the animal himself.”
Volk was in Springfield, Illinois, with Lincoln on May 18 when word arrived by telegraph that he had been nominated for president at the Republican convention in Chicago. On that festive occasion, Volk asked to cast the nominee’s powerful hands and proceeded to set up shop in his house. When the sculptor suggested that Lincoln grip something in his right hand, the candidate went out to his shed and sawed off part of a broomstick. He then began smoothing the rough edges of the sawn piece. Volk told him that was unnecessary, to which Lincoln replied, “I thought I would like to have it nice.” Volk kept that wooden prop after the plaster mold was removed and inserted it into his cast of Lincoln’s right hand (inset).
In addition to sculpting a bust of the clean-shaven Lincoln as he appeared in the spring of 1860, Volk later produced a full-length statue of the bearded president, which was placed in 1877 within the rotunda of the Illinois State Capitol at Springfield near Volk’s statue of Douglas. In 1886 Stephen Volk, the artist’s son, sold the original plaster casts of Lincoln’s face and hands to a group that commissioned sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to make a limited set of replicas. In 1888 that group presented bronze copies fashioned by Saint-Gaudens to the Smithsonian along with the originals from which they were made, on condition that those “plaster casts should never be tampered with” or copied again. HRR
CAPTURING LINCOLN These plaster casts of Lincoln’s face and hands were made on separate occasions in 1860, before and just after the Republican convention, respectively. Lincoln’s right hand was swollen from shaking the hands of the many supporters who came to congratulate him in Springfield for winning the presidential nomination.
