亚伯拉罕·林肯

Healy painted this in 1869, four years after Lincoln was shot, and he did not invent the pose. He lifted it from his own group picture of the year before, The Peacemakers, which showed a real event: a war council in late March 1865 aboard the steamer River Queen, where Lincoln sat leaning forward, chin on hand, listening to his generals in the last days of the Civil War. Here that listening figure is taken out on its own against a plain dark ground. Congress had commissioned a Lincoln for the White House, but President Grant picked a stiffer, more formal portrait instead. Lincoln's son Robert bought this one, and said he had never seen a likeness of his father to compare with it.