Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
A highly gifted artist, Carpenter had attained both critical and commercial success by his early twenties.
Having already painted portraits of three presidents and such celebrated public figures as the Romantic poet James Russell Lowell and the visionary newspaperman Horace Greely (who figures prominently in Figuring), he was animated by “an intense desire to do something expressive” commemorating this landmark document. Aided by the financial and social capital of friends, he set out to persuade Lincoln to let him immortalize the occasion in a grand painting.
As soon as he secured the president’s consent, Carpenter left his New York studio and headed for Washington. On February 6, 1864, he met with Lincoln, who invited him to reside at the White House while working on the painting.
So began what would become First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln — a painting Carpenter completed in about four months. For more than a century and a half to come, it would bedeck the United States Capitol as both a benediction and a warning, for the moment it immortalizes would cost Lincoln his life and America its awakening.
Lincoln was heavily criticized for his anti-slavery views and…
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