Lincoln The Rail Splitter – Historic Print
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: Lincoln The Rail Splitter, preserved in this historic print. It comes from the collections of the Library of Congress, scanned from the original and carefully restored.
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Lincoln The Rail Splitter
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Ferris's painting shows Abraham Lincoln as a young man with an axe and a split rail, the image that gave him the nickname "the Rail Splitter" during his 1860 presidential campaign. Joseph Lindon Smith's contemporaries would not have known it, but this color reproduction comes from a later era, c. 1909, when Lincoln's centennial was approaching and printers were turning popular paintings into inexpensive colored prints for schools and homes. The picture is best read as a piece of myth-making: it presents Lincoln's frontier labor as a model of self-reliance, a theme that suited the Republican campaign of 1860 and the commemorations that followed his death.
| Created / published | c. 1909 |
|---|---|
| Medium | photomechanical print, color |
| Notes | Reproduction of painting by J.L.G. Ferris |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 874 × 1,089 px |
| Reference | L-F-9 |
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