Description
This print reproduces William Willard’s 1864 oil on canvas The Penny Image of Abraham Lincoln. The National Portrait Gallery catalogs the painting as NPG.76.36. Willard worked from a photograph Anthony Berger made on February 9, 1864, at Mathew Brady’s Washington gallery, three weeks before Lincoln named Ulysses S. Grant general-in-chief.
Berger’s profile became the model for Victor David Brenner’s design on the Lincoln cent, first struck in 1909 for the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Willard’s canvas translates that photograph into paint: Lincoln in a dark coat, the familiar bearded profile that later circulated on copper coin. The oil is not the Brady negative and not the mint die. It is a painted copy of the sitting that gave the penny its face.
This listing is a contemporary print after the painting, not the original oil. Choose fine art paper, luster photo paper, or mounted canvas.
