Brown, William H.:

$6,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

PORTRAIT GALLERY OF DISTINGUISHED AMERICAN CITIZENS, WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, AND FAC-SIMILES OF ORIGINAL LETTERS. First edition of this dramatic work of visual biography. This impressively large scale work is notable for its lithographs of renowned Americans of the 1820s, '30s and '40s, showing the subjects standing in full-length silhouette profile, against a tinted background, resulting in effective and evocative portraits. All the portraits (save for the George Washington frontispiece) are based on sketches made from life by William Henry Brown (1808-82), who was widely celebrated for his scissor portraits. Brown prepared the biographical text himself, and the silhouettes (with appropriate tinted backgrounds) were transferred to stone and printed by one of the best known lithographic firms of the period: the Kelloggs of Hartford, Connecticut.Included (after the necessary eulogistic frontispiece dedicated to Washington) are John Marshall, John Quincy Adams, Richard C. Moore, Andrew Jackson, John Forsyth, William Henry Harrison, John C. Calhoun, De Witt Clinton, Richard M. Johnson, Joel R. Poinsett, Alexander Macomb, Martin Van Buren, Samuel L. Southard, Henry Clay, Henry A. Wise, Thomas Hart Benton, John Tyler, Levi Woodbury, Thomas Cooper, Daniel Webster, William White, Silas Wright, Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, Felix Grundy, Dixon H. Lewis, and John Randolph. Each portrait is accompanied by another plate displaying a facsimile of the subject's handwriting, usually in a pie

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