A Final Image of Lincoln, Hastily Sketched at City Hall, Is to Go on Display

Starting at noon on Monday, April 24, 1865, through noon the next day, perhaps as many as 100,000 people trooped through City Hall. The line of mourners came through the basement doors, wended its way up the stairs through the Governors Room, where New Yorkers paid their final respects to the martyred President Abraham Lincoln, and snaked back down to City Hall Park.

A six-man honor guard was on duty around the clock. Photographers and illustrators were barred by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton for reasons of taste (a photo taken from afar was confiscated, rediscovered by a teenager in 1952, and is now on display in the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill.).

Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, ChicagoThis image of Abraham Lincoln, lying in state at City Hall, was sketched by a French artist in the early hours of April 25, 1865.

But around 2 a.m. on April 25, Pierre Morand, a French expatriate and Washington acquaintance of the president, somehow managed to pause long enough at the open coffin to hastily sketch Lincoln’s likeness. He returned to his studio, made another copy and then a final ink and white gouache version, which will go on sale in New York this weekend.

Harold Holzer, a Lincoln scholar, describes it as “the last image of Abraham Lincoln from the flesh.”

“It’s extraordinary that while an effort to photograph Lincoln lying in state at City Hall was suppressed, no one bothered to restrain the French artist who visited to pay his respects â€" and make a quick drawing of the remains â€" in the middle of the night of April 25, 1865,” said Mr. Holzer, a Lincoln scholar who serves as senior vice president for public affairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“This talismanic likeness is almost a holy relic to admirers,” Mr. Holzer said. “It is after all the very last look at the features that had become more familiar to Americans than that of any other living contemporary. Both symbolically and literally, at least in terms of what Lincoln called ‘civil religion,’ it’s an icon.”

The drawing, 4¾ inches by 6½ inches, is being offered by Daniel R. Weinberg, the owner of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop in Chicago. It will be displayed at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, which begins on Thursday at the Park Avenue Armory, and on Sunday at the Professional Autograph Dealers Association show at Hunter College.

“Morand had sketched Lincoln enough times ‘from life’ that he was able to capture the essence of the man in death,” a brochure from the bookshop explains. “Lincoln’s animated features are stilled and at rest, as only death can bring. Eyes closed and his face in its death pallor, his head makes an impression on the tasseled pillow beneath. Dressed in his usual suit, with his bow tie straighter than normal and a slight wrinkle in his shirt, numerous flowers are draped around the coffin - as much to cover up the smell of Lincoln’s body during the 20 days he was on display, as for a memorial.”

Mr. Weinberg said he has owned the sketch for about a year. Before that, it was in the hands of a private collector for decades. Because of its rarity and quality, Mr. Weinberg is asking $175,000, and given its historical value, he hopes a New York institution will buy it.

“I’d like it to have a correct home,” he said.