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Home Walt Whitman Photograph #003

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Walt Whitman Photograph #003

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Date	July 1854
Place	New York
Photographer	Samuel Hollyer of a daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison (original lost)
Note	Of the day the original daguerreotype was taken, Whitman remembered, "I was sauntering along the street: the day was hot: I was dressed just as you see me there. A friend of mine—Gabriel Harrison (you know him? ah! yes!—he has always been a good friend!)—stood at the door of his place looking at the passers-by. He cried out to me at once: 'Old man!—old man!—come here: come right up stairs with me this minute'—and when he noticed that I hesitated cried still more emphatically: 'Do come: come: I'm dying for something to do.' This picture was the result." The job of engraving the image for the 1855 frontispiece was given to Samuel Hollyer, who wrote, "the order was given to McRae but as he was not a stipple engraver (but a mezzotint one) he turned it over to me, and I had several sittings from Walt Whitman as it was taken from a daguerrotype [sic] and was difficult to work from." Though the image portrayed him as he was that summer day, Whitman later worried it sent the wrong message, "The worst thing about this is, that I look so damned flamboyant—as if I was hurling bolts at somebody—full of mad oaths—saying defiantly, to hell with you!" He also worried about the portrait because "Many people think the dominant quality in Harrison's picture is its sadness" but he nevertheless liked the portrait "because it is natural, honest, easy: as spontaneous as you are, as I am, this instant, as we talk together." Whitman guessed that at the time of this portrait he weighed "about a hundred and sixty-five or thereabouts: I formerly lacked in flesh, though I was not thin. . . ." The engraving appeared in the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass,
Type	Steel engraving
Credit	Bayley Collection, Ohio Wesleyan
Saunders number	4
ID	Walt Whitman Photograph #003

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