James Grant Wilson to Walt Whitman, 12 July 1890
loc_vm.01514.jpg
THE FRONTENAC
St. Lawrence River,
J. W. ALMY, Manager.
12 July 1890
Dear Mr Whitman
The artist Reich1 is now completing a large etching of you which is to appear in folio with portraits of other poets and writers in a volume to be entitled "American Authors." For this work I am expected to contribute the letter press. As it is proposed that each singer should have his favorite poem appear in fac-simile, will you at your leisure, kindly make a mss. copy of your favorite, or a portion of it, for the purpose mentioned? For the month of July my address is as above. After July no 15, East Seventy-fourth St, New York City. Mr Reich will soon send you a proof of your portrait for which you may remember that you him a short sitting last winter
Were you pleased with the article and portrait of yourself which appeared in the sixth volume of my "Cyclopaedia
loc_vm.01515.jpg
of American Biography, issued by the Appletons? If you did not happen to have seen the work, I will take pleasure in sending you the
sketch and illustration on my return to the city next month. Believe me with best wishes,
Correspondent:
General James Grant
Wilson (see the letter from Whitman to Wilson of May 21,
1879) was an editor, author, and bookseller. He was a Brevet Brigadier
General in the Civil War; later, he served as President of the New York
Genealogical and Biographical Society and as an editor for Appleton's. He was a frequent contributor to periodicals, and he wrote
or edited numerous works, including Bryant and His
Friends (1886), a four-volume Memorial History of New
York (1892–1893), and a biography titled Life
of Fitz-Green Halleck (1869). For more information on Wilson and a more
complete list of his principal works, see "General James Grant Wilson," Makers of New York: An Historical Work Giving Portraits and
Sketches of the Most Eminent Citizens of New York, edited by Charles
Morris (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1894), 103.
Notes
- 1. Jacques Reich (1852–1923) was a portrait etcher from Hungary. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; he would later establish a studio in New York. He also worked for the United States Mint. Reich made the drawing of Abraham Lincoln that appeared on the tickets for Whitman's Lincoln Lecture in Madison Square Theatre in New York in 1887. He visited Whitman late in the poet's life and made what is believed to be the last drawing of Whitman done in the poet's lifetime, dated "Feb. 3 '90." For a reproduction of Reich's drawing of Whitman, see Edwin Haviland Miller, ed., Selected Letters of Walt Whitman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 273. [back]