The cast for this life mask was done in April 1860 by Leonard Volk. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.

The cast for this life mask was done in February 1865 by Clark Mills. Photo by Gloria Swift.

These two extraordinary life masks—made but five years apart—record with painful precision the grueling physical toll the Civil War exacted on Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln remembered the first sitting for Leonard Volk, in 1860 in Chicago, as “anything but agreeable”—not surprising, since the mask hardened so fast he had trouble pulling it off.  Taking no chances, he had his hair and beard trimmed dramatically before posing at the White House in 1865—but sculptor Clark Mills had improved the process significantly, and this time it caused no discomfort. Yet the strain on Lincoln could hardly be hidden.  His secretary John Hay was right when he observed of these two life portraits: “the first is of a man young for his years,” the other “sad and peaceful in its infinite repose,” showing one “on whom, sorrow and care had done their worst without victory.” Often mistaken for a death mask, it was, Hay concluded, the portrait of a man “of unspeakable sadness and all-sufficing strength.”

By Harold Holzer. Holzer’s most recent book is Lincoln: President-Elect.