Whitman wrote on a package containing this and the another photo, "some good ones (may-be the best I have of all or any)." Whitman described the photo as "Spieler's 3/4 face, open neck, the 'Lear'," and the name "Lear photo" has persisted. Whitman's friend Mary Costelloe gave it that name, and Whitman and his friends approved (see Whitman's letter to Richard Maurice Bucke [loc.07651] in which he references Costelloe and "the Lear"; see also Joann P. Krieg, "Don't Let us talk of that anymore": Whitman's Estrangement from the Costelloe-Smith Family," WWQR, vol. 17, 2000, pp. 92–94). Whitman's dress here echoes his "nightshirt" dress in the Gardner portraits nearly twenty years earlier. In 1888 Samuel Hollyer, who over thirty years earlier had made the famous 1854 engraving of the daguerreotype that served as the frontispiece for the 1855 Leaves, made an engraving of this photo, but Whitman was not pleased with it, finding the eyes too glaring: "I have a dull not a glaring eye" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Sunday, August 12, 1888).
For more information on Jacob Spieler, see "Notes on Whitman's Photographers."
Photographer: Jacob Spieler
Date: ca. 1876
Technique: photograph
Place: Philadelphia (Pa.)
Subject: Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892 | Philadelphia (Pa.)
Creator of master digital image: Ohio Wesleyan University, Bayley Collection
Rights: Public Domain. This image may be reproduced without permission.
Work Type: digital image
Date: ca. 2000–ca. 2007