Vintage Portrait - Walt Whitman, three-quarter length portrait, seated

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Walt Whitman sits in this three-quarter-length portrait with his hands resting on his lap, a pose that shows the broad-shouldered, bearded figure readers later came to know from the frontispiece of Leaves of Grass. Whitman published the first edition of that book himself in 1855, and he went on revising it through many later editions, so images of him from these years carry the weight of a writer shaping his own public image. Portraits like this one circulated widely among admirers and were reproduced in books and periodicals, helping to build the poet's reputation as an unconventional American voice.

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