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Background
They noticed the height first. He was 6 feet four, a good eight inches above the average man. Then there was his stoop; after that – not mentioning, right away, the deep-set eyes below bushy eyebrows, the big nose, the narrow upper lip and fuller lower one – they almost always remarked on his complexion. One said it was acne-scarred; most said it was rough, or weather-beaten, so deeply-furrowed it looked like the proverbial ten miles of bad road. People would note how huge his feet and hands were, too, and how long his limbs; that his large ears and wide mouth might fit a face twice his size. Others mentioned the high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, and the prominent jaw, what with its sparse bristle of black beard - which, at the suggestion of an 11 year-old girl in 1860, he began to wear “chinstrap” style. The hair on his head, cresting a high brow, was black as well, and so thick and unruly he himself called it a “bird’s nest.” Secretary of War Stanton once said he looked like a gorilla. Nathaniel Hawthorne called him “the homeliest man I ever saw.”
Yet in his towering oddity, Lincoln presented a physical mystery: put together, he was greater than the sum of his parts. He conveyed strength, seriousness, and sagacity. A first impression lasted but an instant; visible in the next were his kindness, his melancholy, his thoughtfulness. Current portraits, he added, were all failures; they looked like caricatures.
It was exactly to that point – a Lincoln portrait – that this photo, known as “The Famous Profile,” was created. Taken by Anthony Berger, the manager of Brady’s Washington, D.C. gallery on February 9, 1864, it was in all likelihood commissioned, as it were, by the artist Francis B. Carpenter for his Emancipation painting.
“The Famous Profile” would be used by another artist some 45 years later just as momentously, when President Theodore Roosevelt picked an immigrant Jewish-Lithuanian to create a Lincoln penny to commemorate Lincoln's 100th birthday in 1909. Victor David Brenner, a sculptor and medalist, used two of the seven poses taken at the February 9, 1864 sitting to model the Lincoln-head penny; this image is one of them.
The Lincoln penny is the longest continuously running series in United States coinage. How many have been minted? In 2015, the estimate was 55,420,900,000,000,000 (55.42 quadrillion) – making it, surely, the most seen Lincoln image in history.
Physical Description
Signed Photo (“A. Lincoln”), being a carte-de-visite by Anthony Berger, Manager of the Brady Gallery, [Washington D.C., February 9, 1864. Hamilton & Ostendorf, O-88A.
