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. Related Website The Walt Whitman Archive
Walt Whitman
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Artist: G. W. Waters (American, 1832-1912) Title: Walt Whitman Audio: Date: 1877 Dimensions: 27″ x 22″ Location in Library: First floor Media: Oil on canvas Owner: The Brooklyn College Library Collection. © Artist’s Estate Description: Walt Whitman’s friend and benefactor John H. Johnston commissioned G. W. Waters to paint this portrait of Whitman, who by 1877 was one of America’s most celebrated poets. Waters, best known for his New York landscapes, captures Whitman as he is most often remembered: as the “good gray poet.” In 1955, Professor John Valente and his colleagues in the Brooklyn College English Department scraped together $1400 to buy both this portrait and the earlier Whitman portrait by Charles Hine.
