The story of a Lincoln painting and how it guided Theodore Roosevelt

Imagine you've decided to write a historical novel starring real-life figures like President Theodore Roosevelt, Gilded Age banking titan J. P. Morgan and Abraham Lincoln’s White House bodyguard, Col. William H. Crook. It might go something like this:

Scene: New York City, 1858. Roosevelt is born to a prominent family, his father a pro-Republican businessman and philanthropist, his mother a pro-slavery Southern socialite.

Teddy’s youngest years are dominated by the Civil War, and like his father, he becomes a great supporter of both the Union cause and the Union president. After Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, the six-year-old future president watches from his grandfather's second-story window on Broadway as Lincoln's casket processes below on the New York leg of its 1,600-mile journey from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois.

From that moment, Roosevelt's admiration for America's Civil War president never wanes or wavers. More than four decades later, he would proclaim: “Lincoln was the plain man of the people, the people's president — homely, gaunt, ungainly — and this homely figure, clad in ill-fitting clothes of the ugly modern type, held one of the loftiest souls that ever burned within the breast of mankind. . . . [W]e are stirred to awe and wonder and devotion for the great man, who, in strength and sorrow, bore the people's burdens through the four years of our direst need, and then, standing as high priest between the horns of the altar, poured out his own life blood for the nation whose life he had saved.”

After a sickly boyhood, Roosevelt grows and flourishes, attending Harvard (less than two decades after Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert), operating cattle ranches in the Dakotas, charging up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, and charting a political career that saw him rise from state assemblyman to New York City police commissioner, assistant secretary of the Navy, New York governor, and then vice president to William McKinley.

When Roosevelt assumes the presidency himself following McKinley's assassination in September 1901, he brings Lincoln with him to the White House, first as an ideal of the wisdom and statesmanship he hopes to emulate, then in physical form through a new portrait by a once-renowned artist named Ernest G. Wells (1875-1958) — which is where our story really begins.

'I do as I believe Lincoln would have done'

Wells was a respected portrait and landscape painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, known for his images of both prominent historical figures and private clients.

In 1899, he completes an oil portrait based on a celebrated Lincoln campaign photograph, which had been commissioned nearly 40 years earlier by artist Thomas Hicks in Springfield when the painter proved unable to capture Lincoln’s elusive likeness from the flesh. The photograph, posed inside Springfield’s State House, captured the clean-shaven Lincoln as he looked in the weeks following his nomination for president, as tensions between North and South tilted toward secession.

Both the photograph and Wells' later oil on canvas show Lincoln in three-quarter profile, dressed in his usual formal attire, his weathered face reflecting the self-assurance of a onetime dark horse who now seemed destined to win the presidency, imbued with both the weight of the coming crisis and the resolve that would carry him and the nation through it. Alexander Hesler’s original photograph was itself widely circulated and inspired both Hicks’ painting and its adaptation into a campaign lithograph. Reissued decades later, it serves as a model for Wells as well.

This is Wells’ only known portrait of Lincoln—and it seems singular that the youngest American president was gifted a portrait of the clean-shaven “Honest Abe,” and not the bewhiskered icon “Father Abraham.”  The artist sends the finished work to Roosevelt and receives back a letter dated Oct. 5, 1903: “I am greatly pleased with the Lincoln picture,” TR writes, “and regard it as a real addition to the White House.”

Roosevelt has the portrait hung above the fireplace in his office in the newly built West Wing, where it remains on display throughout his presidential tenure. The placement is deliberate and symbolic, a visual touchstone giving silent counsel during one of the most consequential presidencies in American history—as if to perpetuate a visual dialogue between the 16th president and the 26th. Roosevelt spoke frequently of looking to Lincoln's example when faced with difficult decisions, and many aides and cabinet officers recalled him asking aloud, “What would Lincoln do?” For an answer, he often turned first to Wells’ painting.

As Roosevelt put it: “When I am confronted with a great problem, I look up to that picture, and I do as I believe Lincoln would have done. I have always felt that if I could do as he would have done were he in my place, I would not be far from right.” All but unacknowledged by historians, here is the very picture that inspired what TR called his “Jackson-Lincoln theory of the presidency,” which he bluntly described as a kind of “tempered radicalism.”

Lincoln remained a guiding light for Roosevelt, who welcomed opportunities to connect with his predecessor, including two visits to Lincoln's tomb in Springfield. For Roosevelt's second inauguration, in 1905, he even wore a ring that contained a strand of Lincoln's hair — a gift from his secretary of state, John Hay, who had started his long career in public service as Lincoln's assistant White House secretary. In February 1909, in the final three weeks of his presidency, TR made certain he was on hand for the Lincoln centennial observances at the late president’s Kentucky birthplace, where he hailed his predecessor as “the mightiest of the mighty men,” one whose blood was shed for the union of the people.”

Three years later, a would-be assassin took aim at Roosevelt, too. TR was spared when the bullet struck the eyeglass case he carried in his breast pocket, then passed through the thick manuscript of an oration he was about to deliver in his ill-fated campaign to win back the presidency. Though wounded, Roosevelt delivered the address as scheduled. By then, he had surrendered the Wells painting.

Upon leaving the White House in March 1909, Roosevelt presented the canvas to his chief disbursing officer, Crook, who had served as one of Lincoln's personal bodyguards during the final year of his life. A former Washington policeman, he had been assigned to the night shift at the White House, one of four plainclothesmen assigned to provide round-the-clock protection to Lincoln wherever he went. Only weeks before Lincoln’s death, Crook had been drafted into the Union army—though he had fought previously—requiring Lincoln to write an exemption from further service so he might continue to work in the White House.

It was Crook who had walked at Lincoln’s side, together with a small contingent of Marines, through the smoldering ruins of Richmond on April 4, 1865, just one day after the Confederate capital fell—a perilous excursion through streets still thick with smoke and danger, where the president's safety rested squarely on his guards’ vigilance. It was Crook who watched in awe as newly freed Blacks rushed to greet Lincoln there with such unrestrained joy that the president beseeched them to thank only God for “the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.”

Crook was among the last to speak with Lincoln, just before the president and his wife left the White House for Ford’s Theatre on the evening of April 14, 1865. Though devastated by the assassination—and haunted by the fact that he had not accompanied the president that fateful night—Crook remained committed to public service, remaining in the White House for approximately 50 years under 12 successive administrations, from Lincoln through Woodrow Wilson. His tenure ended only with his death in office in 1915—but not before he recounted his experiences in two distinctive memoirs: “Through Five Administrations” (1910) and “Memories of the White House” (1911).

In 1912, three years before he died, Crook sold Wells’ Lincoln portrait to financier J. P. Morgan through Morgan's chief librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, who was responsible for managing and expanding the financier's vast art collection. Morgan personally approved the acquisition.

Following his own death one year later, Morgan's Americana collection was partially donated to institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Morgan Library and the Frick Collection, while other objects were dispensed through sale. Wells’ Lincoln entered the secondary art market and in the late 1970s was acquired by private collectors in Westchester County, New York, with whom it remained for more than four decades.

Lincoln portrait to go on public display

Scene: Somewhere in upstate New York. In 2021, retired financial adviser turned multimedia artist David Eric Soderquist and his brother John Carl Soderquist are gifted the Lincoln portrait by a relative. While both brothers are co-owners of the painting, it is David who drives a new round of research, pursuing the provenance and history of the piece with determination and persistence. He begins extensive conservation work and a deep-dig investigation to reconstruct every detail of the portrait's journey. He is guided at first by a typewritten label affixed to the verso of the canvas, which identifies the painting's artist and documents its sale from Crook to Morgan on Jan. 5, 1912, placing it within the broad narrative of American cultural patronage and Gilded Age collecting.

Now, the Lincoln painting will be leaving the private sphere and returning to public view, greeting visitors as they enter the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which opens this July 4 in Medora, North Dakota, as part of the greater America 250 celebration. There, the portrait will join a collection that tells the story of TR’s life, ideas, and influence through personal mementoes and artifacts, interactive exhibits, and the whole landscape of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, which preserves the rugged Badlands ecosystem and the Little Missouri River that so captivated the future president during his two years here in the 1880s.

What will visitors see when they turn their gaze to this long-forgotten Lincoln portrait, on which Roosevelt's own eyes rested so often during his White House years? At the surface, they'll see an example of a portraiture tradition that seeks not just to replicate a president's photographic likeness but to convey his essential character and spirit. Going deeper, they'll see an object that has linked generations of American leaders bound together by personal history and public duty. But imagine for a moment what the portrait itself has “seen.” Lincoln's eyes, gazing out from the canvas, watched as Roosevelt railed against corporate monopolies and fought for business regulation, consumer protection, and major initiatives like the Pure Food and Drug Act, the expansion of national parks and national forests, the building of the Panama Canal, and the dispatch of the Navy's 16-battleship "Great White Fleet" on a circumnavigation of the globe, simultaneously demonstrating American power and goodwill.

In that single canvas, visitors will experience an immediacy and connectivity that transcend time.

Both Roosevelt and Lincoln were champions of the common citizen who expanded executive authority in service of national unity and reform—Lincoln to preserve the Union and end slavery, Roosevelt to regulate concentrated wealth and conserve about 230 million acres of wildlands for the benefit of all Americans.

Wells’ painting embodies the enduring American principle of E pluribus unum: out of many, one. Through Lincoln's image, we recall the personification of values central to the American identity: perseverance, democracy, liberty, and the pursuit of equality and opportunity.

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, this is a work that speaks directly to both the nation’s richest history and highest aspirations.

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and is a board member of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. Harold Holzer is the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Hunter College's Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.

The two are the authors of the forthcoming "The Railsplitter and the Rough Rider: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and the Power of Remembrance."

Documentation

The provenance of this painting is supported by primary source documentation including:

• The original typewritten label dated Jan. 5, 1912, affixed to the canvas verso, documenting the sale from Col. William H. Crook to J. P. Morgan.
• Correspondence from Theodore Roosevelt to Ernest G. Wells dated Oct. 5, 1903, preserved in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.
• Historical photographs of the Roosevelt White House executive office, circa 1903-04, showing a Lincoln portrait consistent with the Wells composition.
• Correspondence preserved at the Morgan Library, New York, confirming Belle da Costa Greene's involvement in the Morgan acquisition.
• Acceptance of the painting for inclusion in the grand opening exhibition of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, following comprehensive review of supporting materials.
• TR’s comments on the Lincoln painting from Charles T. White, "Lincoln and Prohibition" (NYL Abingdon Press, 1921), 111; second part of quote from Merrill Peterson, "Lincoln in American Memory" (NY: Oxford University Press, 1994), 164.