Artist: Charles Hine (American, 1827-1871)
Title: Walt Whitman
Audio:
Date: 1860
Dimensions: 27″ x 22″
Location in Library: First floor
Media: Oil on canvas
Owner: The Brooklyn College Library Collection.
Description:
Charles Hine painted this portrait of Walt Whitman, the great, iconoclastic poet, when Whitman was forty-two years old and living in Brooklyn. Whitman loved this portrait and included an engraved version of it in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, the first edition that he did not self-publish.
Even though this portrait was Whitman’s favorite — he said it portrayed him “in full bloom” with “not a thing amiss” — he sold it in 1873 to his friend and benefactor John H. Johnston. Whitman had suffered a stroke and needed money to move from Washington, DC to his brother’s house in Camden, NJ.
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