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Life mask of Abraham Lincoln


Several weeks before Abraham Lincoln secured the presidential nomination of the Republican Party on May 18, 1860, the sculptor Leonard Wells Volk asked to do his portrait. Realizing that Lincoln was unable to come often to his Chicago studio for sittings, Volk decided to make a life mask, upon which he based his bust. “There is the animal himself,” Lincoln remarked when the mask was shown to him.


Leonard Wells Volk (1828–1895)
Plaster, 1917 cast after 1860 original
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

 

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