Rare Lincoln life mask jewel of Mugar exhibition

By Eric McHenry

On May 19, 1860, the day after Abraham Lincoln was nominated for the U.S. presidency, the sculptor Leonard Volk had the presence of mind to sit him down and have his picture taken. Unfortunately, Volk never got to make prints from the glass plate negatives. They were destroyed, along with everything else in his Chicago studio, by the Great Fire of 1871.

However lamentable, their loss is more than made up for by something the opportunistic Volk had done earlier that year: he had taken a plaster impression of Lincoln's face. There are many surviving photographs of Lincoln from the period, after all, but only one life mask.

And the Department of Special Collections at BU has one of only three first-generation replicas, made by Volk himself in the mid-1870s. The beardless, sharp-featured countenance is currently on display, along with a generous sampling of the University's extensive Lincoln holdings, in Mugar Memorial Library.

The Volk likeness has made an inestimable contribution to American historical art.

"Fortunately," Avard Fairbanks, a sculptor and dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Utah, wrote in 1960, "the Lincoln face has been preserved for us through the work of a Chicago sculptor, Leonard Wells Volk . . . This event has been hailed by a great art critic as one of the two most important accomplishments in American portraiture; the other is the life mask of George Washington made by the French sculptor Houdon in 1785.

The rare first-generation replica of a Lincoln life mask made by the sculptor Leonard Volk in 1860 is currently on display in Mugar Memorial Library.

"Virtually every sculptor and artist uses the Volk mask for Lincoln. I have committed its lines to memory," Fairbanks wrote in Lincoln for the Ages (Doubleday, 1960), a collection of essays by writers as various as Carl Sandburg, Shelby Foote, and Ulysses S. Grant III. "It is the most reliable document of the Lincoln face, and far more valuable than photographs, for it is actual form. All the world is indebted to Leonard Volk for his contribution."

The replica came to Special Collections through the estate of Truman H. Bartlett, a noted sculptor and connoisseur of Lincolniana. Bartlett had obtained it from the French academic painter Jean Leon Gerome, who had received it as a gift from his longtime student Douglas Volk, son of the sculptor.

"In presenting the mask in question to Gerome," the younger Volk wrote to Bartlett in 1885, in a letter also on display at Mugar, "I did all I could to show my gratitude to him for the years of instruction he gave me, and I imagined from his acknowledgment that he appreciated the gift but it seems his sentiments were from the tongue only or he would not so soon have parted with it . . . You are now the possessor of one of the three replicas in existence, and I myself have not even one . . ."

Volk first met Lincoln in 1858, during the famous Lincoln-Douglas series of debates. Ironically it was Stephen Douglas, Volk's brother-in-law and patron, who facilitated the acquaintance. Volk had Lincoln sit for the initial life mask impression on March 31, 1860. From this he sculpted a bust, which on May 18 he personally delivered to the Lincoln home in Springfield. His visit coincided with the announcement of Lincoln's presidential nomination; Volk seized the opportunity to arrange additional sittings. He had a professional photographer make the negatives and took plaster impressions of the ascendant statesman's hands. Alex Rankin, the Lincoln collection archivist at BU, notes that the mold of the right hand is slightly enlarged from all the congratulatory handshakes the nominee had been receiving.

Because Volk took them with him when he moved from Chicago to Rome in 1870, the impressions escaped the fate of the photographs. Ultimately, they found their way to the National Museum in Washington, D.C.

Later reproductions of the hands, in plaster, accompany the first-generation life mask replica in the Mugar showcase. On a pedestal next to it stands a bust made from the Volk likeness in the mid-1880s. The exhibition also includes one of 33 bronze reproductions of the mask made by the famous sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and several pieces of pertinent correspondence from the Bartlett papers and other collections. In one letter to Bartlett, dated 1892, Leonard Volk wrote that he was gazing upon "the veritable chair in which President Lincoln sat naturally as if in conversation" for the life mask impression 32 years earlier.

For more information about the Department of Special Collections, visit www.bu.edu/speccol.

"Case Studies" is an occasional feature highlighting items of interest from the University's collections and archives.