Walt Whitman by William Kurtz, ca. 1865 - 1873

Clara Barrus said that this photograph was "taken by Kurtz in the Brooklyn Eagle office in 1873" (Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades, 1931, p. 42), but 1873 seems an unlikely year for any photographs, since Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke in January, was devastated further by his mother's death in May, and moved to Camden in July. Note the similarity of clothing and pose to other Kurtz photographs from this period (zzz.00049, zzz.00057). Clearly this photo is in Kurtz's "Rembrandt" style of shadow and light, a style he did not introduce until 1867. An engraved version of this photograph appeared in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper on April 8, 1876, with the caption, "Walt Whitman-Photographed by W. Kurtz."

The time between the opening of Kurtz’s first studio in New York City in 1865 and the publication of an engraving based on the pose in the New York Daily Graphic on November 25, 1873 outlines the broadest range during which Whitman might have sat for the photograph. A carte-de-visite copy of the photograph (zzz.00058) exists, however its grainy quality and lack of sharpness and clarity make it difficult to compare to this version. That version was dated between 1867 and 1873. Recent research further narrows the range from 1869 (the first year that Kurtz kept an office at 872 Broadway) to 1872 (the year before Whitman’s stroke, as well as the year before the Daily Graphic published the engraving in 1873).

This photograph served as the inspiration for several artistic interpretations, most notably a crayon portrait by Kurtz and Thomas Dewing’s 1875 chalk portrait (see Robinson, “Laurence Hutton and a Newly Recovered Photograph of Walt Whitman," WWQR, p. 160; Smithsonian American Art Museum). In February of 1875, Dewing presented the portrait at an exhibition hosted by the Boston Art Club in Boston’s Studio Building, where it was “singled out for its excellence of technique.” In creating the chalk image, Dewing likely worked directly from the photograph, as the pose and form in Dewing’s portrait and the Kurtz photograph appear almost identical at first glance. Of the crayon portrait which hung in John Johnston’s home, and later in the office of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Horace Traubel remarked, and Whitman agreed, that the portrait, “though a good piece of work it did not satisfy . . . as a just impression of Whitman” (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Tuesday, December 9, 1890). When featured at an exhibit of Whitman memorabilia in 1925, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle declared that the pose showed Whitman “as most of his friends knew him—wearing a hack suit, a slouch hat on his white head, his beard blown by the wind” (November 8, 1925, p. 11). Whitman himself generally agreed with Traubel’s dissatisfaction with the tendency of artists to change what they see: “I find I often like the photographs better than the oils—they are perhaps mechanical, but they are honest. The artists add and deduct: the artists fool with nature—reform it, revise it, to make it fit their preconceived notion of what it should be” (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Thursday, May 10, 1888).

Most Americans during Whitman’s lifetime would have encountered the pose as an engraving and it even inspired fond memories for the poet. When the woodcut appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper on April 8, 1876, Civil War Veteran Albert G. Knapp rushed to compare it to a “picture” Whitman had given him during the war, the appearance of the pose prompting memories of an old friend. “Is this Walt Whitman—‘The Poet of health & strength,’ our Walt Whitman of old?” he wrote in a letter to the poet, drawing attention to Whitman’s capacity to move through personalities and avoid capture in any single representation (letter qtd. in Charley Shively, Drum Beats: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Boy Lovers, 1989, p. 154). The earliest noted appearance of the engraving is in the New York Daily Graphic on November 25, 1873, attributed to an R. Piquel (Robinson 162). Engravings of the pose are scattered across newspapers and more recent books on Whitman. In later years, as newspapers began printing photographs, the crayon portrait was also printed over and over, often with the caption “Walt Whitman in his Prime.”

For more information on William Kurtz, see "Notes on Whitman's Photographers." See also Rose Robinson, “Laurence Hutton and a Newly Recovered Photograph of Walt Whitman,” WWQR, vol. 36, nos. 2/3, Fall 2018/Winter 2019, pp. 155–178.