March 15, 2018
THE DARK KNIGHT:
Uncovering Thomas Nast's First Drawings of Abraham Lincoln: The cartoonist's early rough sketches of his great subject turned up recently in an old scrapbook. (Adam Gopnik, 3/05/18, The New Yorker)
On Lincoln's first visit, in 1860, he stopped to have his picture, now indelible, taken by the photographer Mathew Brady. Less well known is that, on his 1861 trip, the other great New York image-maker of the time, the cartoonist Thomas Nast, saw him, too--for the first time--and made a series of drawings that are startling in their intimacy and alert observational power. The series has been known by scholarly rumor, but recently, tucked among the sketches in a Civil War notebook, two small images that Nast made of Lincoln's face have been uncovered for the first time. This discovery we owe to the historian Ted Widmer, who came upon them in the archives of Brown University.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2018 5:01 AM
