ALEXANDER GARDNER
Abraham Lincoln 1863
national portrait gallery, washington, d.c.
hands: ann shumard, 10.1 5.92

On August 9, 1863, the day before Alexander Gardner opened his new studio at 7th and D Streets, Abraham Lincoln came in to pose. Pictures from the session were used by the President in his 1864 campaign for re-election.

Sometime in the 1870s, another studio owner, Moses P. Rice, acquired the
20 x 17 inch glass wet-plate. An original negative had commercial value because
photographers sold pictures of celebrities directly to the public—until the halftone
method of reproducing prints was perfected in the 1890s.

Rice applied tape to form a neat border when printing the picture in contact with photographic paper. (The tape may also keep the collodion emulsion from separating from its glass support.) Rice’s granddaughter sold the plate to the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in 1983. To avoid damaging its collodion surface, Ann Shumard at the Portrait Gallery put the
negative out for me on a light box with its emulsion side up. Seen this way, the image is backwards.

“A lot of 19th century glass was chemically unstable. It embrittles over time, becoming even more fragile than glass normally is,” says William F. Stapp, who exhibited the plate in 1990 when he was the Curator of Photographs at the Portrait Gallery. “I held my breath till we got the negative safely into the display case we had spent weeks designing.”