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Tne Met Abraham Lincoln I claim no rights to this image just the colorization. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The salt print was the dominant paper-based photographic process for producing positive prints during the period from 1839 through approximately 1860. The salted paper technique was created in the mid-1830s by English scientist and inventor Henry Fox Talbot. He made what he called "sensitive paper" for "photogenic drawing" by wetting a sheet of writing paper with a weak solution of ordinary table salt (sodium chloride), blotting and drying it, then brushing one side with a strong solution of silver nitrate. This produced a tenacious coating of silver chloride in an especially light-sensitive chemical condition. The paper darkened where it was exposed to light. When the darkening was judged to be sufficient, the exposure was ended and the result was stabilized by applying a strong solution of salt, which altered the chemical balance and made the paper only slightly sensitive to additional exposure. In 1839, washing with a solution of sodium thiosulfate ("hypo") was found to be the most effective way to make the results truly light-fast. Public Domain you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. Artist:William Marsh (American, active Springfield, Illinois, 1850s�1860s) Person in Photograph:Abraham Lincoln (American, Hardin County, Kentucky 1809�1865 Washington, D.C.) Date:May 20, 1860 Medium:Salted paper print from glass negative Dimensions:Image: 19.9 x 14.5 cm (7 13/16 x 5 11/16 in.) Classification:Photographs Credit Line:Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2005 Accession Number:2005.100.89 Not on view This photograph, made in Springfield, Illinois, on May 20, 1860, was the first portrait taken of Abraham Lincoln after he had received the nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in Chicago. It is one of five photographs taken by William Marsh for Marcus L. Ward, a delegate from Newark, New Jersey. Although many in the East had read Lincoln's impassioned speeches, few had actually seen the senator from Illinois. At fifty-one years old, Lincoln appears much younger in this photograph, innocent as yet of the great toll the presidency would take on him. His face is an odd contra diction of parts: his right eye typically wanders, his large right ear flaps behind a high cheekbone and sunken cheek, and his hair, described by Sir William Howard Russell as a "thatch of wild Republican hair," is loosely combed. He did not grow his characteristic beard until October 1860. The first president of the United States to wear a beard, Lincoln appears cleanshaven in only one-third of the more than one hundred known photographs. Yet Lincoln is ruggedly handsome. Marsh presents the face of the prairie lawyer from the backwoods of Kentucky, the man who would declare, in support of the Union, "A house divided against itself cannot stand"; the man who only two years after this photograph was made would deliver the Emancipation Proclamation, and who, in his second inaugural address in 1865, spoke of reconstructing a vital, new country from the ashes of the South, "With malice toward none; with charity for all." Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings Provenance Exhibition History References
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