Lot 320B

19th C. American Carved Wood Lincoln Relief Portrait

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Lot 320
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19th C. American Carved Wood Lincoln Relief Portrait
19th C. American Carved Wood Lincoln Relief Portrait
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19th C. American Carved Wood Lincoln Relief Portrait

Estimate: $500 - $750

Starting Bid: $250

(0 Bids)
by Artemis Fine Arts
June 25, 2026 9:00 AM MDT (In Progress)
Live Auction
686 S. Taylor Avenue
Suite 108
Louisville, CO, US 80027

North America, United States, American folk art, ca. 1861–1875 CE. A carved wooden medallion holds the sixteenth president in low relief, his bearded face turned three-quarters into the light, the brow furrowed and the cheeks drawn with the gravity of a man who carried a fracturing republic. The portrait is worked in a pale, close-grained hardwood, the planes of the face brought up in confident relief against a recessed oval ground, then set within a deep-coved frame of darker tone so that the sitter seems to rise from a shadowed niche. Lincoln wears the uniform of his office, frock coat, waistcoat, and a loosely knotted cravat, the lapels and collar incised with the economical assurance of a maker who understood that less cutting reads as more dignity. Size of carving: 2.4" W x 3.2" H (6.1 cm W x 8.1 cm H); of frame: 6.5" W x 8.8" H (16.5 cm W x 22.4 cm H).

The whiskers are the historical hinge. Clean-shaven through his prairie years, Lincoln grew his beard only after the autumn of 1860, prompted (so the cherished story goes) by an eleven-year-old correspondent named Grace Bedell, who advised him that ladies liked whiskers and would coax their husbands to vote for him. He arrived at his inauguration the first bearded president, and it is that newly hirsute, soon to be war-worn face the carver has chased into the grain.

Objects of this kind belonged to the vast vernacular industry of Lincoln devotion that swelled during the Civil War and erupted into mourning after Ford's Theatre, when households across the reunited states wanted the martyred president near at hand, rendered not by academic sculptors but by skilled amateurs working from the popular likenesses then in circulation. Whether cut in homage to a sitting president or in grief for a fallen one, the piece carries the unmistakable charge of folk reverence, a private altar to public memory, the patient labor of a knife standing in for a nation's attempt to hold a face it could not bear to lose.

Provenance: ex-private collection, Fairhaven, Massachusetts, USA, collected from 2010 to 2015

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Item # 203289

  • Condition: Very Good. A few nicks to areas of carving and edges of frame, but, otherwise, both are intact and in very good overall condition. Nice remaining detail. Inscribed "A Lincoln 1861 Ar, 52" on verso of frame. Suspension hoop on top periphery for display.

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Bid Increments
From: To: Increments:
$0 $299 $25
$300 $999 $50
$1,000 $1,999 $100
$2,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $19,999 $1,000
$20,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 $99,999 $5,000
$100,000 $199,999 $10,000
$200,000 + $20,000