Remarkable folk art doll, featuring a stuffed cambric body clad in a hand-tailored wool vest, shirt, and suit and leather shoes, with Lincoln's face sensitively rendered in pencil and watercolor, with stitched yarn beard. WITH ferrotype campaign stickpin depicting a headless Lincoln, circa 1860, AND "Hon. Abraham Lincoln 1860 / The Rail Splitter of the West" token drilled for suspension as a pocket watch fob. Housed in an associated violin case. Height of doll 28 inches.

This handmade doll was owned by the celebrated American painter and engraver William Edgar Marshall (1837–1907) and was purportedly used by the artist as a three-dimensional studio model for his widely acclaimed painted portrait of the President.

Born to Scottish parents in New York, William E. Marshall relocated to Washington, D.C., as a young man, initially earning his living as an engraver at a watchcase factory. He subsequently took a position with the U.S. Treasury Department, where he learned the intricacies of portrait engraving. Encouraged by Cyrus Durand, a friend a fellow engraver, Marshall executed i  plates of both presidential candidates in the Buchanan-Frémont campaign, which he submitted to the American Bank Note Company in 1858. These portraits earned him a coveted position with the firm, for whom he worked for several years, becoming one of its best engravers. Around 1863, eager to advance his skills, Marshall traveled to Paris to study painting under Thomas Couture, and two of his student canvases were admitted to the Salon. Moved by news from the Homefront, however, Marshall returned to the United States during the Civil War, as observed by Mary Bronson Hartt in the Dictionary of American Biography (1936): "News of the assassination of Lincoln brought him home to paint, from photographs and descriptions, a portrait of the martyred President."

Because Lincoln never sat for Marshall, the artist executed his original oil on canvas likeness through a painstaking study of contemporary prints, descriptions, and photographs. The resulting portrait was immediately heralded as one of the finest, most emotionally complex representations of the president ever produced, capturing at once the intellect, humility, and profound empathy integral to Lincoln's character.

The portrait garnered immediate acclaim from those who knew Lincoln best. Senator Charles Sumner wrote: "It will always be valued as presenting the original in his most interesting expression, where gentleness and sympathy unite with strength." In addition, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton found the work to be "a beautiful likeness of that great and good man," while the President’s own son, Robert Todd Lincoln, offered the ultimate endorsement: "I take pleasure in testifying to its excellence as a likeness. I cannot suggest any improvement."

The widespread popularity of Marshall's painted portrait prompted the Boston publishing firm Ticknor & Fields to contract the artist to replicate the image as a copperplate engraving, making it accessible to the broader American public by subscription beginning in 1866. On July 25, 1866, Marshall wrote to the Atlantic Monthly, describing both the work itself and his reverence for the project overall: "I send you with this a proof of my engraved portrait of President Lincoln, upon which I have been engaged so long, engraved as you are aware after my own painting... The execution of this portrait has been a pleasant labor to me during the many months I have been engaged upon it; and in executing it, I have endeavored not merely to gratify a professional ambition in producing a work of art, but I have sought, so far as could be done in one picture, to represent Mr. Lincoln as he was, and as he will be known in the pages of history and biography."

This lot represents an extraordinary, intimate glimpse into Marshall's creative process, with simultaneous appeal to collectors of American art, folk art, and Lincolniana.

Note:

Marshall's original painted portrait, completed around 1867, is housed in the permanent collection of the Yale University Art Gallery and hangs on display in the Law Library. The painting was given to the University in 1895 by alumnus Matthew Chaloner Durfee Borden (1842–1912), a preeminent American industrialist known as the "Cotton King" for his expansive printed cloth business.