Walt Whitman by William Kurtz?, ca. late 1860s

This photo is often dated 1861, but it appears to be later, and it would seem to be the photo Whitman refers to in a notebook dated between 1869 and 1871, where he records a desire to "Collect the good portraits" including "Kurtz's head with eyelids drooping" (Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, vol. 4, New York University Press, 1984, p. 1400). Whitman goes on to make notes for a poem about this portrait, including lines like:

Veil with the lids thine eyes, O soul! . . .
Droop—droop thine eyes O Soul. . . .
Mask with their lids thine eyes, O Soul!
The standards of the light & sense shut off
To darkness now retiring, from thy inward abysms.
How curious, looking thence, . . .
Appears aloof thy life, each passion, each event. . . .
The objective world behind thee left . . . (pp. 1400–04)

Richard Maurice Bucke dated this photo much earlier (1861) and saw Whitman's "attitude and aspect" here suggestive of "the shadow of the national catastrophe, which was to crush him as well as so many thousand others . . . already falling upon him and darkening his life" (The New England Magazine, "Portraits of Walt Whitman," March 1899, Vol. XX, No. 1, p. 38). This and other Whitman photographs from this period would seem to be classic examples of Kurtz's "Rembrandt" style of light and shadow, a style he pioneered in 1867.

For more information on William Kurtz, see "Notes on Whitman's Photographers."