Dorchester Illustration 2554 Abraham Lincoln in Dorchester
Thinking about Presidents Day brings to mind visits to Dorchester by Presidents both before they became President and after. Ronald Reagan stopped at the Eire Pub. Barack Obama visited TechBoston Academy during his presidency. George Washington visited Dorchester to scout out Dorchester Heights. John Adams traveled through Dorchester from Quincy to Boston. Presidential debates have drawn others. In the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln came to Dorchester in 1848, campaigning for Zachary Taylor, the Whig Party candidate for president and hero of the Mexican-American War.
The illustration is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln by the artist Thomas Murphy Johnston, a Dorchester artist.
The following is taken from https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/Lots/auction-lot/(PRINTS–1860-CAMPAIGN)-Johnston-TM-lithographer;-after-Germ?saleno=2486&lotNo=85&refNo=748241
The artist and lithographer Thomas Murphy Johnston (1834-1869), the son of a famous caricaturist [David Claypool Johnston], based this very early campaign print on a September 1858 photograph by Christopher German. It was apparently done circa May 1860, just after Lincoln’s nomination. It was reviewed in the Boston Transcript of 1 June 1860, which called it “a most excellent lithographic portrait.”
The publisher, Charles H. Brainard of Boston, thought an even better portrait could be done from an original sketch, so the next month he then sent Johnston west to Illinois. Both artist and publisher were quite strapped for cash–Brainard put 1000 copies of his Stephen Douglas engraving in hock just to provide Johnston with a ten-dollar advance. Lincoln sat for Johnston in Springfield, and the resulting crayon portrait was then engraved in Boston by Francis D’Avignon (not offered here). It proved less successful than the original Brainard-Johnston collaboration, and only one copy is known to survive today.