National Portrait Gallery | Face to Face blog

Happy 175th Birthday to Mark Twain, the Eminently Quotable American

Mark Twain taught us many things.

Once, he taught us to curse. “Whar’n the ---- you goin’ to? Cain’t you see nothin’, you dash-dashed aig-suckin’, sheep-stealin’, one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!” (From Life on the Mississippi)

Mark Twain taught us how the stranger fixed the frog jumping contest. “. . . He got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot—filled him pretty near up to his chin . . . He couldn’t budge; he was planted as solid as an anvil, and he couldn’t no more stir than if he was anchored out.” (From “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”)

Another time, he taught us how to eat well during travel. “. . . I used to slip ashore, towards ten o’clock, at some little village, and buy ten or fifteen cents’ worth of meal or bacon or other stuff to eat; and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn’t roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself, you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t never forgot. I never see pap when he didn’t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say.” (From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.)

And still, again, he taught us that the American national pastime was also the sport of the ancient British kings. “The experiment was baseball. In order to give the thing vogue from the start, I chose my nines by rank, no capacity. There wasn’t a knight in either team who wasn’t a sceptred sovereign. As for material of this sort, there was a glut of it, always, around Arthur. You couldn’t throw a brick in any direction and not cripple a king. Of course I couldn’t get these people to leave off their armor; they wouldn’t do that when they bathed. They consented to differentiate the armor so that a body could tell one team from the other, but that was the most they would do. So, one of the teams wore chain-mail ulsters, and the other wore plate armor . . . And when a man was running, and threw himself on his stomach to slide to his base, it was like an ironclad coming into port . . . The umpire’s first decision was usually his last; they broke him in two with a bat, and his friends toted him home on a shutter. When it was noticed that no umpire ever survived a game, umpiring got to be unpopular.” (From A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.)

Any list of American humorists must begin with Mark Twain. From Twain, we Americans learned to laugh at and with ourselves, at others, and at a frog weighted down by shotgun pellets.

Happy 175th Birthday, Mr. Twain.

- Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Samuel Clemens / Edwin Larson / Oil on canvas, 1935 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the artist

America Gives Thanks

By NPG Intern Aurora Engle-Pratt

Thanksgiving is regarded by many as one of the most quintessentially American of all holidays. Its history dates back before our nation’s independence, to the days of the colonies. It is a day of tradition and family, a time to reflect and remember the past seasons. College kids return home, families gather, and for one day the nation breathes a collective sigh and all give thanks together.

But how did this day grow from one colony’s harvest celebration to a national holiday? Thanksgiving was not celebrated widely until after the Revolutionary War, when it became an unofficial day of praise and thanks tied to the fall harvest. Both Presidents Washington and Madison made Thanksgiving addresses during their terms in office. But it was not until nearly one hundred years later, during one of the darkest periods in the history of the United States, that Thanksgiving as we know it today was born.

On October 3, 1863, during the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in a moving speech that showcased the best ideals and values of America. In the first lines of his speech, Lincoln said:

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

Lincoln’s words remind us that even in the worst times we can find much to be thankful for. Lincoln led our country in a time of change and uncertainty, a time when the nation was divided, and yet he still believed that giving thanks and acknowledging our many blessings were important enough exercises to warrant a day devoted to their practice. This Thanksgiving season, as we once again face a time of change and uncertainty, we should take the day to be thankful for our nation, for its “fruitful fields and healthful skies,” for its ideals, and for all the freedoms we enjoy as citizens of the United States of America.

Happy Thanksgiving from the staff of the National Portrait Gallery!

Aurora Engle-Pratt is a student at Montgomery College and an intern for the Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery.

Abraham Lincoln / George Peter Alexander Healy / Oil on canvas, 1887 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; transfer from the National Gallery of Art; gift of the A.W.

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, Part III: Overcoming Adversaries and Preserving the Union

With a single mission in mind, Abraham Lincoln fought, during his entire presidency, not just against the South, but also against his critics—a cross-section of Americans that included everyone from journalists to generals. For Lincoln, the task was always to preserve the Union. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln said, “Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.”

By the time Lincoln was sworn in as the sixteenth president on March 4, 1861, seven states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had seceded from the Union. Also by the date of Lincoln’s inauguration, this new confederacy of former states had already elected its own president, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the former United States senator from Mississippi and secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce. Well in advance of his first day in office, Lincoln knew he would preside over a fractious form of the once-united land. He committed himself to the preservation of the Union, but his first task was to bring it back together by whatever means necessary.

One of Lincoln’s early detractors was Horace Greeley, founding editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley believed Lincoln was lethargic in his policies toward both slavery and the war, and used his newspaper as a vehicle to propagate his belief that the president was ineffective. Responding to Greeley’s invective, Lincoln wrote the following in a letter dated August 22, 1862:

As to the policy I “seem to be pursuing” as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.

Though this statement would seem to imply that Lincoln was not concerned about the plight of the slaves, it would be only a few months later that he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Another of Lincoln’s detractors was George McClellan, Lincoln’s choice to head the Army of the Potomac. Routinely, Lincoln had problems with McClellan’s battle plans and eventually demoted him, only to face McClellan as an opponent in the 1864 presidential election. As with other challenges during the war, Lincoln faced off against McClellan and won the election. Lincoln would live for only one week after the conclusion of the war to see his Union reunited following Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Many of Abraham Lincoln’s writings and speeches are well known and often quoted, but it is doubtful that anything Lincoln ever said could better sum up his efforts than the closing words of his second inaugural speech of March 4, 1865:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

- Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery 

Abraham Lincoln / William Willard / Oil on canvas, 1864 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Interview with Photographer Alfred Wertheimer

"Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer" is on view through January 23, 2011.

In 1956, twenty-six-year-old Alfred Wertheimer was asked by RCA Records to photograph a rising twenty-one-year-old star named Elvis Presley. Upon receiving the assignment, Wertheimer responded “Elvis who?”

“I had never heard the name Elvis Presley in my life, at that time,” says Wertheimer. “He was basically a well-known regional singer in the South and now he was breaking in on the national scene.”

"Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer" showcases fifty-six photographs taken during Wertheimer’s short time with Elvis, documenting a young singer on the cusp of superstardom. The exhibition offers an intimate look at the public and private life of one of the world's most famous figures—from the diners to the train stops—in 1956. “Elvis at 21” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery through January 23, 2011.

Alfred Wertheimer was interviewed by Warren Perry, co-curator of “Elvis at 21.” The exhibition is on tour; for dates and locations, visit the tour schedule.

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, Part II: The War and the Presidency Served to Age the Man

The portraits of Lincoln tell the story of Lincoln’s war.

It is a fairly common observation that being president changes a man. And when the day arrives that a woman holds that office, it will most likely be said of her also. The duty is great, the commitment is long, and the experience is intense. The portraits of the early presidents might lie a little, because the artist might have embellished the images a bit, but the photographs are, perhaps, more truthful to the moment, as they are exact and leave less to man-handling and translation than do works of artistic portraiture—this, before the days of Photoshop, of course.

Images of Abraham Lincoln over a five year period tell the entire story of the burdens of the presidency, leaving no doubt as to the effect of the Civil War's toll on our sixteenth president.

Before the war, Abraham Lincoln had no beard. He was fifty-one years old when the image below was taken by Mathew Brady.

Early in the war, President Lincoln grew a beard. He was fifty-four in 1863 and the war had been on for two years when Alexander Gardner took this second image.

Just before the close of the war, President Lincoln was the subject of this last and most famous image, again the work of Alexander Gardner.

Over the years since Lincoln's death, parallels have been drawn and metaphors have been created between the war that ravaged the face of the nation and the obvious deterioration Lincoln suffered from the same experience; Walt Whitman's O Captain, My Captain is easily the most recognized among those tropes.

Next week we will conclude our opening discussions of the war with some notes on President Lincoln's leadership and the union cause.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery

 

Abraham Lincoln / Mathew Brady/ Salted paper print, 1860 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner / Glass plate collodion negative, 1863/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution:gift of the James Smithson Society, CBS Television Network, and James Macatee

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Gardner/ Albumen silver print, 1865/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Abraham Lincoln Elected President, November 6, 1860, Part One

Lincoln was elected president of the United States one hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow.

Lincoln is one of the immortals—one of the true American icons—and it is difficult to imagine a United States without having an Abraham Lincoln there at its most dire and poignant moment. Civil War scholars, reenactors, and amateur historians everywhere may believe that the war evolved around the generals or the soldiers or the battles or slavery or states’ rights, but truly the war was Lincoln's war. He did not want it, he did not like it, and he was pleased to see it end, inasmuch as one can take pleasure in winning a war that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

He presided over the nation during its years of division, turmoil, horror, and destruction.

And more than a few have compared him to Moses, because, like Moses, just as the time arrived for peace and renewal, Lincoln was taken away.

Lincoln is the alpha and the omega of the American Civil War. His election, in a greatly oversimplified sense, of course, was the beginning of the war. Lincoln’s 1863 address at Gettysburg—among all the words spoken and written by all the generals, soldiers, journalists, and politicians—are the words at the very core of the prose composed during the war. Lincoln’s murder is the symbolic end of the war, and the trial and hanging of the Lincoln assassination conspirators is the coda that concludes the bloodiest experience ever to trespass upon American soil.

In his journals of the war, Walt Whitman said of Lincoln, “None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed.”

And while it is not possible here to capture the complete portrait of Abraham Lincoln, over the next two weeks, in a three-part series, this blog will explore Lincoln and his times in order to lay the groundwork for the National Portrait Gallery’s commemoration of the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War. In the next four years, as we arrive at the anniversaries of many of the war’s events, the staff of the NPG will program, curate, lecture, discuss, and write on the significance of this abject chapter in American history.

Learn more about Lincoln and the Civil War in our online exhibtions CivilWar@Smithsonian and One Life: The Mask of Lincoln.

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery 

 

Abraham Lincoln / Alexander Hesler / Photograph, 1860 (printed 1956) / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution