John Greenleaf Whittier 1899 optician_print Grant 1885 — a mourning

Grant 1885 — a mourning lithograph cast in the elevated grammar of a nation burying its general-president

and any space drawn to the founding era — when the republic was still a proposition rather than a fact

and presidents arrayed in the steel-point manner of the parlor album

Mary Ball Washington the Mother of George Washington 1912 — a commemorative portrait issued in the long afterglow of Founding-era reverence

when the South had begun the slow alchemy of turning its defeated commander into marble

John Greenleaf Whittier 1899 optician_print Grant 1885 — a mourningJohn Greenleaf Whittier 1899 a posthumous portrait of the Quaker abolitionist poet, issued seven years after his death, when the nation had begun to canonize the New England conscience that once bent so insistently toward emancipation. The likeness carries the hush of remembrance, ink softened into sainthood. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives,