Profiling Portraits: Pencil In Hand

In this latest entry in our occasional series, Profiling Portraits, in which we focus on different types of portraiture in our collections, I’ll revisit a previous topic – occupational portraits. An occupational portrait typically shows the subject with a tool of their trade. While my other Picture This post focused on 19th-century occupational portraits of all kinds, today I will look closely at the hands of particular sitters. More specifically, to see if they have a pencil in hand and how it connects to their livelihood.

I will start with people holding the pencil because of their connection to the written word. Below we have an image of then 81-year-old William Cullen Bryant in his house in Cummington, Massachusetts, caught in a contemplative state. The poet, journalist, and editor of the New York Evening Post has his pencil in hand, with paper and books on the desk in front of him. Is that a trash can of rejected writing at his feet? In the years right before this print was made, Bryant edited Picturesque America, a two volume set full of both visual representation and written description of scenic views in America, much like the lovely landscape right outside his open window.

Abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe is also depicted in reverie. She holds a pencil in her right hand, with both hands crossed over papers or an open book. This portrait was made twenty years after the publication of her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

While we know the below woman was associated with Nannie Helen Burroughs because this photograph is from her personal papers, it is hard to know if she was a friend, relative, colleague, or acquaintance because the photo lacks identification. (If you recognize her, please leave a comment!) This studio portrait includes props that tell a story – pencil in hand, plus practical dress and purse. Her pose, with foot up on a suitcase, seems confident and her gaze forthright. The folded paper on her knee could be a newspaper. Was she a journalist? I hope one day we can find out!

This quiet photographic portrait shows former President and General Ulysses S. Grant in the last month of his life, at a cottage on Mount McGregor in New York. He is in the act of writing his memoirs, a project he would finish less than a week before his death. The two volume autobiography was published by Mark Twain soon after his passing.

Artists are also sometimes depicted with pencil in hand, as they sketch or draw. American painter and portrait artist Gilbert Stuart depicts himself at work. It may be a pencil or a brush in his hand. Best known for his painted portrait of George Washington, Stuart was still more than a decade away from creating that work at the time he made this self-portrait around 1783.

Artist and illustrator Alfred R. Waud appears in two photographic portraits below, the first by Alexander Gardner and the second by Timothy O’Sullivan. There is a striking difference between the first relaxed studio shot where he poses with a pencil and paper and the second photo, which shows him sketching in the field during the U.S. Civil War. As an artist correspondent, Waud captured the action of the war, sending his drawings to employers such as Harper’s Weekly and the New York Illustrated News. The drawings were used to make engravings for the publications, offering readers visuals of the war and its progress.

Learn More:

• Revisit previous posts in the series, Profiling Portraits, including one on Occupational Portraits of the 19th Century.
• See the U.S. Civil War through the drawings of Alfred R. Waud, part of our Documentary Drawings Collection.
• Explore the Ulysses S. Grant Papers from the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, which include the manuscript draft of his Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant.