Walt Whitman by Alexander Gardner, 1863
Whitman referred to this as "one of the several portraits which William O'Connor called the Hugo portraits" (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Saturday, June 16, 1888), and worried that it was too severe: "do you detect a scowl, a frown, anything bordering on it?" (Monday, December 31, 1888). Looking at it another time, Whitman mused, "That was my prime—that was the period of my power—of endurance: the period in which I was most alive." Many sources identify this photograph as 1864, but several copies exist on the unstamped Brady carte-de-visite cards that Gardner used after leaving Brady's studio in fall 1862 and relocating to Washington, D.C. Whitman also identifies another photograph from this session as "taken from life 1863 | war time Washington | D C."
For more information on Alexander Gardner, see "Notes on Whitman's Photographers."
Photographer: Gardner, Alexander, 1821–1882
Date: 1863
Technique: cartes-de-visite
Place: Washington, D.C.
Subject: Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892 | Washington, D.C. | United States History Civil War, 1861-1865
Instance(s):
Metadata for Digital Item
Creator of master digital image: Alderman Library, University of Virginia
Rights: Public Domain. This image may be reproduced without permission.
Work Type: digital image
Date: ca. 2000–ca. 2006