Lot 1178: Alexander Hay Ritchie (1822-1895) after Francis B. Carpenter (1830-1900) Fine American and European Furniture, Silver, Folk and Decorative Arts and Clocks

First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation Before the Cabinet, 1866 Engraving Published by Francis B. Carpenter 20 3/4 x 32 3/8in (52.7 x 82.2cm)

52.7 x 82.2cm

Left to right: Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War; Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury; President Lincoln; Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy; Caleb B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior (standing); William H. Seward, Secretary of State (seated); Montgomery Blair, postmaster general; and Edward Bates, Attorney General. Born in Homer, New York Francis Bicknell Carpenter was primarily a portrait painter of luminaries including Henry Ward Beecher and Horace Greeley, among others. He was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1852. Carpenter is best known for his First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln (United States Capitol, 1866), a work intended to document Lincoln's reading of his Proclamation to his cabinet on September 22, 1862 (the Proclamation would subsequently take effect on January 1, 1863). Carpenter began work on February 6, 1864 and continued for the next six months, a period documented in his memoir Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln: The Story of a Picture (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1866), in which he called the Proclamation "an act unparalleled for moral grandeur in the history of mankind." (see p. 10-11). Alexander Hay Ritchie was born in Scotland, studied in England, and moved to New York in 1841. He was a mezzotint engraver and an artist. See Barry Schwartz, "Picturing Lincoln" in William Ayres (ed.) Picturing History: American Painting: 1770-1930 (New York: Rizzoli and Fraunces Tavern Museum, 1993), fig. 91, pp. 139-141.