Assassination of President Lincoln

After Lincoln’s assassination, Northern families often displayed in their homes lithographic prints of the man they believed to be the savior of their nation. This colored print from shortly after Lincoln’s death depicts an interior scene of his assassination at Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865. John Wilkes Booth wields a blood stained knife and jumps from the box where Lincoln sits slumped in his chair. Mary Todd Lincoln attends to her husband while the surrounding spectators exhibit hysteria and alarm. The Lincolns’ box, depicted as extremely small and overcrowded, contains their guests, Major Henry R. Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris, although another unidentified female onlooker also occupies the box. Lincoln's guard had earlier left his post, so he is not depicted. On the top of the box railing rest a pair of opera glasses and a program, inscribed, “Ford's Theat../ American Cousin,” which is the name of the play being performed that night. Oddly, the audience on the first floor of Ford's Theater appears to be viewing the events from the same level as the box, which makes Booth's leap one story down to the stage seem like a short hop over the box parapet to the floor. Prints of the assassination were in such demand immediately after the event that printmakers paid little attention to the accuracy of the depictions.

The artist of this work, James E Baker (1837-1914), began as an apprentice at J. H. Bufford & Co. in 1857. He eventually became John Bufford’s principal draftsman and illustrator of sheet music. He worked in NYC in 1860-1867 and specialized in portrait prints. During the Civil War he produced, for Bufford, political cartoons and lithographs relating the national drama. He later worked for Armstrong & Company, remaining active until 1888.

Currently not on view