Abraham Lincoln in Vivid Color
Re-creation of Lincoln from a 1860s portrait.
"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong” - Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln is one of the most celebrated men in American history, famous for ending slavery in the United States. He was born very poor, and faced struggle after struggle in his young life, including being abandoned for six months by his father. He also lost 3 out of 4 children, and a former fiance. His life was incredibly difficult, yet nearly everyone who met him said he had a gentle, compassionate manner. He was also very funny. The man as he is described by his contemporaries looks very different from the photographs showing a tired, grim man. I’ve worked on some re-creations and restorations to really bring Lincoln back to life.
Lincoln seemed an incredibly hard man to truly capture. Author Michael Burlingame writes, “Lincoln's features were the despair of every artist who undertook his portrait…They put into their pictures the large, rugged features, and strong, prominent lines; they made measurements to obtain exact proportions, but the picture remained hard and cold. The picture was to the man as the grain of sand to the mountain, as the dead to the living. Graphic art was powerless before a face that moved through a thousand delicate gradations of line and contour, light and shade…There are many pictures of Lincoln; there is no portrait of him.”
Walt Whitman who said about portraits of Lincoln that “none caught the deep though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is something else there…a painter from another time or generation is needed.”
Quotes about Lincoln’s appearance all agree - he was a tall, thin man, slightly awkward, with an intellectual face. He also was described as having a sadness about him, which is no surprise given the many tragedies he suffered. It seems he still managed to be very kind, and his eyes were much softer and more emotional than the rest of his face.
A lot of colorized versions will give him bright blue eyes or really dark brown eyes, but his eyes were described by contemporaries and his own wife as being gray.
Unique in appearance, Lincoln was also unique in voice and mannerisms. He had a very distinct voice and speaking style, so much so that nearly everyone that listened to him remarked upon it somehow. Journalist Horace White described Lincoln as having “a thin tenor, or rather falsetto, voice, almost as high-pitched as a whistle.”
The New York Herald reported that “a frequent tendency to dwindle into a shrill and unpleasant sound.”
Lincoln was said to have spoken slowly, pausing between words and phrases, letting his words really sink in. Despite the shrillness of his voice, his words still resonate with us even today.
A modern interpretation.