Some winter photos of Portland's Lincoln statue, in the South Park Blocks just north of the spooky Teddy Roosevelt statue I just posted about. We're in luck this time around, in that Portland Public Art has a nice detailed post all about the statue and the sculptor, and the Smithsonian inventory has an entry for Ol' Abe as well. When I say we are fortunate, I mean I'm fortunate in not having to research the thing from scratch, and you're fortunate in that the research was done by actual experts rather than little ol' me. So everybody wins, I guess.
The statue is mentioned in a thread here, someone says it's one of their favorites despite being super-traditional. Somebody else says there's an identical copy in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but that turns out not to be true. The Milwaukee Lincoln uses the same basic pose -- tall, a bit gaunt, lost in thought, and gloomy -- but it was done by a different guy. So it would be more accurate to say that both statues resemble Lincoln, which should come as no surprise to anyone.
2 comments :
Thanks so much for these photos. I needed to re-see Lincoln to write a scene in my novel. He looks as dejected as I remembered. I'm grateful to have found your posting.
I'm not sure if any of the links that you included address this at all, but I remember reading that not everyone in Portland was very happy when Coe donated this one. Apparently, someone(s?) wrote into the Oregonian to complain about the statue (just like they did with Thompson's elk), saying that Lincoln looked too gloomy. I'm paraphrasing heavily here, but Coe's response was "Of course he looks gloomy! He just went through a war that split the country apart. Should he be smiling?"
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