[Mourning Corsage with Portrait of Abraham Lincoln]

Unknown|Brady & Co.

April 1865 · Black and white silk with tintype set inside brass button · Photographs

About the time of Abraham Lincoln’s long funeral tour, April 21 to May 3, 1865, enterprising vendors produced mourning corsages featuring black silk ribbons adorned with small circular photographs of the president. The likeness is a tintype copy of a portrait from February 9, 1864, that Anthony Berger had made of President Lincoln in Mathew B. Brady’s Washington gallery. The corsage would have been worn on one’s lapel and then carefully preserved as a memento mori of the war’s final casualty.

Artist

Unknown|Brady & Co.

Date

April 1865

Medium

Black and white silk with tintype set inside brass button

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2013