Washington and Lincoln Portrayed: National Icons in Popular Prints (review)

book reviews267 that confirm the artists' portrayals of battlefields and campgrounds, and entertaining stories of the nuts-and-bolts of collecting these images of war. For instance, Waud scooped virtually all of his competitors at Gettysburg; although the squeamish Edwin Forbes finally arrived late on the second day, he couldn't bring himself to watch the bloody climax on Cemetery Ridge. A chapter on contemporary sketches and cartoons of Abraham Lincoln and interesting, although rather disjointed, descriptions ofphotographers' efforts to document the war are also included. Thompson clearly respects these art forms, and he succeeds in attaining his primary goal of investigating the pictures as methods of "indoctrination and propaganda," (8). But a few caveats remain. Although not quite two dozen engravings are reproduced in the book, at least twice as many would have been welcome. The sections on photographers and on Southern artists like Adalbert Volck, though interesting, distract from the book's larger themes and subjects. On the whole, however, The Image of War stands up well thirty-five years after it was first published despite—perhaps because of—the recent boomlet of lavishly illustrated books about artists' representations of the Civil War. Thompson argues that his "picturemen," as he calls them, created a "new artistic concept of war ... a new composite panorama of army life" beyond heroic battlefield exploits (127). Thompson was a teenager during World War II; perhaps these path-breaking artists remind him of cartoonists andjournalists like Bill Mauldin and Ernie PyIe, who showed the American foot soldiers of Thompson's generation in more realistic and more human terms. James Marten Marquette University Washington and Lincoln Portrayed: National Icons in Popular Prints. By Harold Hölzer. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1993. Pp. xii, 252. $41-95·) Harold Hölzer provides a marvelous overview of the history and evolution of engravings, lithographs, and prints and their contribution to the establishment of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as American icons. Of all the American presidents and heroes, Hölzer concludes that the highest "pedestal would now be shared, but it would remain theirs alone" (171). The techniques used to produce popular engravings and lithographs from portraits ofWashington in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are carefully explained. The introduction of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, combined with improved techniques of reproduction, provided commercial artists an opportunity to create the images ofWashington and Lincoln that pleased and conformed to the popular image of the American hero. The author skillfully uses illustrations ofengravings, lithographs, portraits, and photographs to trace the changing images of his subjects as they appeared to an adoring public. 268CIVIL WAR HISTORY Lincoln's transformation was less consistent than that of Washington and is explained with the use of numerous photographs, caricatures, and prints. Although care is taken by Hölzer to develop the history of image printing in the age of Washington, fully one-third of the book is devoted to chronicling the legacy of Lincoln. The text has a confident and fast-paced style when it shifts from Washington to Lincoln (79) and expands the theme of Merrill Peterson's Lincoln in American Memory (1994). This shift is understandable because of the author's recognized scholarship in the field of Lincolniana, as exhibited in his collaboration with Gabor S. Boritt and Mark E. Neely in The Lincoln Image (1984). The strength of the book is a well-documented position that Washington and Lincoln, through widely circulated media images, reached a unique and lofty status within American iconography. The use of the two figures in the same picture, particularly after Lincoln's assassination, "confirmed for Lincoln a remarkable ascendancy in the national pantheon" (174). Hölzer identifies a number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the images created from the portraits of Washington and, later, from the photographs of Lincoln . He attributes these problems and frequent poor quality to the commercial interest of the artist and promoters. The introduction of photography in the age of Lincoln, while allowing a more accurate likeness than that of his predecessor , allowed the distribution of caricatures and often negative images of the sixteenth president. Therefore, the transformation of Lincoln is less consistent and finally overcomes these negative...