Life Mask and Hands of Abraham Lincoln
Bronze sculpture by Leonard Volk, circa 1875 from plaster casts made in 1860
Mask: 19.6 cm x 22.1 cm x 14.3 cm; left hand: 16.8 cm x 11.1 cm x 6.3 cm; right hand: 16.8 cm x 13 cm x 9.2 cm
Sculptor Leonard Wells Volk made Abraham Lincoln’s plaster cast life mask and hands in 1860. Volk was a leader in the art circles in Chicago, where he was a founder of the Academy of Design and for eight years its president. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 provided the opportunity for Volk to create a statue of Douglas, and he persuaded Lincoln to promise to sit for a bust. Two years later Lincoln fulfilled his promise while in Chicago for a court case. Volk sent the first plaster copy of the original mask and hands to the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Gérôme later gave the casts to the American sculptor Truman H. Bartlett, who had these bronze casts made in Paris about 1875.
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