I’m Warren Perry and we’re here in the National Portrait Gallery in the President's
Gallery with David Ward, NPG historian.
David, we’re standing in front of a case that contains two life masks and two hand
casts of Abraham Lincoln.
Can you tell us a little bit about these interesting pieces?
Sure, I'd be happy to.
First of all, it's good that you mention that they are life masks because people when they
look at them for the first time in particular think that they’re death masks.
People are familiar with the notion of a death mask, a remembrance of a loved one or a remembrance
of some great statesmen.
So people say, oh, they must be death masks.
And of course they're white, they're inert, so they have the aura about them of being
cadavers.
But in fact they're not.
And it was very important in the nineteenth century as photography was getting going that
people know what other people look like.
It was a big cultural issue.
It was a big theme in American society of representation.
And one of the ways that you did it was through life masks that would give an absolute, perfectly
accurate depiction of someone.
There was no interpretation by the painter or the artist.
It was a Plaster of Paris mask that was put on your face and recorded it accurately.
What we have at the Portrait Gallery, we were very fortunate, we have an early life mask
of Lincoln done you'll notice also smooth faced.
He hasn't yet growing the beard that he would in 1861.
And then, most touchingly, the older one which is taken a month or two before his assassination
in which you can see the lines and age marks scored on his face like as if with a knife.
He of course also you can see the beard in this.
You can see also that his hair is much thinner.
And you see reflected in these two life masks what toll that the war took him.
Lincoln, who was a melancholy personality anyway, internalizing the struggle, internalizing
the political issues, but most of all internalizing the great magnitude of the conflict, internalizing
in many ways every death on the battlefields or in the home front.
Seems in some ways to index the conflict through his very personality and physiognomy.
I'm always…
I've been interested in the hands just as a kind of afterthought here, that because
Lincoln was really a working-class president.
He comes out, of course, terrible poverty, tries to make himself successful in the Middle
America: the Old Northwest, Indiana, Illinois.
He, you know, was famous, of course, for being an ax man, a rail splitter, the famous stories
have him as a plough boy working for his father’s very poor farm.
But that Lincoln rose from, albeit a member of the Whig party, the party of internal improvements,
the party of Henry Clay, but the party of economic progress, if you will.
That he rose on the backs of his own labor, and these hands to me are very moving.
That Lincoln was in a sense a self-created, self-made man and that his hands are almost
a symbolic evocation of that.
Now, tell us, because it must have been incredibly difficult to sit through having a life mask
made of yourself, can you give us an inkling of how that process worked?
There had to be a little bit of pain involved in this.
Yeah.
I think that there was.
In fact, there's a famous case.
Thomas Jefferson I think in 1819.
There was a man name Browere, JH Browere, who was making a kind of early version of
Madame Toussauds.
He was going around taking life masks of major American political figures, particularly of
the revolutionary generation as they got older.
And the report of Jefferson, who wasn't in very good health in the late eighteen-teens,
nearly died because Bowere, you know, there was little air holes.
You would have little straws poked into your nose.
You had to lie perfectly still while several pounds, six, seven pounds of Plaster of Paris
was put on your head to, you know, to make the mold.
And Jefferson, who was polite to a fault, didn't sort of alert Browere that he was suffocating
and had a very unpleasant time.
In fact, Jefferson's daughters thought at one point that they would sue Browere because
Jefferson did go into a bad period of health.
So no it wasn't something…
I mean it wasn't ridiculously dangerous but it was uncomfortable, it was unpleasant.
But it was also a sense that people did feel like Lincoln, who was very…
Lincoln was always having his picture taken.
He was very conscious of the new media of photography.
But he was also aware that as an unknown coming out of Middle America, unknown particularly
to the eastern power brokers of the Republican Party, that he needed to have his picture,
needed to have his face in front of the public that he was appealing to for votes.
And so he was very conscious that he needed to be an image-maker as well as a statesman,
and a life mask was one way of doing that.