| Note: | Whitman referred to this as "one of several portraits which William O'Connor
called the Hugo portraits," and worried that it was too severe: "do you
detect a scowl, a frown, anything bordering on it?" Looking at it another time,
Whitman mused, "That was my prime—”that was the period of my
power—”of endurance: the period in which I was most alive." Many sources
identify this photograph as 1864, but several copies exist on the unstamped Brady
carte-de-visite cards that Gardner used after leaving Brady's studio in fall 1862 and
relocating to Washington, D.C. Whitman also identifies another photograph from this session as
"taken from life 1863 / war time Washington / D C." |
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