Object Details
Object Essay
Although the recognized leader of the newly formed Republican party, William H. Seward (1801–1872), then a senator from New York, failed to win the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1856 and 1860. From 1861 to 1869, he served as Secretary of State first in the administration of Abraham Lincoln and, after Lincoln’s assassination, in Andrew Johnson’s cabinet.
As Lincoln increasingly asserted his leadership, Seward became one of his most loyal cabinet officers. He was so closely identified with Lincoln’s administration that the cabal that murdered the President on April 14, 1865, simultaneously attacked the Secretary at the home where he was bedridden with a broken jaw from a carriage accident. His attacker, having savagely beaten Seward’s son, stabbed the Secretary repeatedly with a bowie knife, fracturing his skull. The shock led to the death of his wife, an invalid, within two months, and that of his daughter Fanny within the year. Fanny had witnessed the ferocious attack, and recorded her horror in her diary: “Blood, blood, my thoughts seemed drenched in it.”1The Papers of William H. Seward, microfilm edition, Library of Congress, Reel 198, Diary of Frances Adeline (Fanny) Seward, April 16, 1865.
Though the circumstances of Seward’s sitting to Rufus Wright are not known, the date of April 1865 on the leaning book depicted here must refer to the tragic event at Ford’s Theatre and Seward’s own narrow escape. Seated in profile, Seward solemnly concentrates upon an unfolded letter in his hand. His attitude of quiet concentration, combined with the events, justifies the assumption that Seward is reading one of the many condolences that must have flooded in; Rufus Wright took the opportunity to turn a portrait commission into a commemorative image.
Popular history remembers Seward as the Secretary who arranged the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 (“Seward’s Folly”), but his larger reputation rests upon his aggressive and skillful diplomacy during the Civil War, when maintaining the neutrality of foreign powers, especially Britain and France, was paramount to the Union. After the war’s end, he pressed the French to end their intervention in Mexico, as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. As Secretary of State under Andrew Johnson, Seward was resolute in support of the administration’s reconstruction policy, although he was much criticized within his own party.
Rufus Wright was born near Cleveland, Ohio, in 1832; he died in Chicago, April 15, 1900. Wright studied at the National Academy of Design and with George Augustus Baker, Jr. (1821–1880), a highly regarded portraitist, and taught at the school of the Brooklyn Academy of Design. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1876 (The Morning Bouquet) and 1877 (The Inventor and the Banker). His portrait subjects, painted in New York, Brooklyn, and Washington, D.C., included Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Father McGinn, and Clerk of the Supreme Court William T. Carroll.
Seward’s introduction to Rufus Wright is documented in a letter dated January 18, 1865, in which Wright requests a diplomatic post abroad in order to further his career as an artist.2Ibid., Reel 87, general correspondence, Rufus Wright to William H. Seward, January 18, 1865. Most of this meager biography comes from a letter of January 7, 1937, preserved in the vertical files of the Library of the National Museum of American Art/National Portrait Gallery, from Charles E. Fairman, Art Curator, U. S. Capitol, to Ruel P. Tolman, Acting Director of the then National Gallery of Art, now the National Museum of American Art. See also Groce and Wallace, 706. For George A. Baker, see Catalogue of American Portraits in The New-York Historical Society (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 1: 39, no. 86; 2: 775, no. 1989; and 855, no. 2167. It is probable that Seward responded by offering Wright this official portrait commission.
William Kloss
Excerpted from Clement E. Conger, et al. Treasures of State: Fine and Decorative Arts in the Diplomatic Reception Rooms of the U.S. Department of State. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991.