Smithsonian’s ‘Graphic Masters’ on display

While the National Gallery of Art’s “Designing the Lincoln Memorial” is the best of the Lincolnpalooza of exhibits currently celebrating our 16th President’s 200th birthday, not everyone took as long to complete their Lincoln encomiums as did the memorial’s creators, Henry Bacon and Daniel Chester French. Walk Whitman eulogized Lincoln in his 1865 poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Whitman is immortalized by his epic free-verse manifesto “Leaves of Grass,” which he revised repeatedly between its first publication in 1855 and his death nearly 40 years later. Of his visual legacy, there’s a painted portrait by Thomas Eakins, but we prefer Thomas Dewing’s earlier chalk drawing on paper. Dewing drew it in 1875, two years after Whitman had suffered a paralytic stroke. He chose to omit the ravages of this debilitating ordeal from his idealized depiction of Whitman’s thoughtful countenance. Dewing’s quiet tribute is part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “Graphic Masters” survey of its permanent collection.