Bring Me the Head of Abraham Lincoln

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about our large seated carving of Abraham Lincoln by the woodcarver Frank Moran of Vermont. That post caught the attention of a fellow blogger Kevin Duffy, whose blog, Candler Arts, is one of my favorites. Kevin wrote to me and told me that he had often visited the Fenimore Art Museum and admired our Lincoln. When a bust of Lincoln carved in 1933 by Moran came on the market, he jumped at the chance to buy it. He wrote his own post on the bust back in September.

Well, I’m happy to report that because we both connected in the blogosphere the head of Lincoln has come to Cooperstown to join our statue in the permanent collection of American folk art. It’s a great addition to our representation of Moran’s work. Done about a decade before our seated portrait, the bust of Lincoln has a completely different carving style, much folkier in the quizzical expression on Lincoln’s face. You can now imagine the evolution from this fairly straightforward representation to a more monumental style realized in the larger work.

Frank Moran was one of the great folk carvers of the 20th century, and Abraham Lincoln is one of the great folk heroes in self-taught art. As we approach the sesquicentennial of the Civil War it is especially appropriate that our Lincoln iconography is expanding. Many thanks to Kevin for catching my post and doing one of his own on the piece that now has a home in Cooperstown.

Abraham Lincoln: The Kitchen Companion

I roughed him out with a double bitted axe and then started carving. Took me almost a month to hollow out the chair and leave the rungs. I’ve got him sitting on a kitchen chair – figured he was a poor cuss, like me, and he’d feel right at home.

Visitors to the Bakersfield, Vermont home of woodcarver Frank Moran would, it is said, often have to take a second glance before realizing that the “person” they saw sitting in the kitchen was actually a life-size wooden figure of Abraham Lincoln. Placed next to the coal stove in a simple, dignified manner, “Old Abe” was fulfilling the only purpose his maker envisioned – keeping him company.

Frank Moran (1877-1967) was a Vermont farmer, carpenter, and woodcarver who, sometime around 1940, transformed a single pine log into his personal vision of an American hero without the help of power tools or even a picture of Lincoln to use as a model (although the influence of Daniel Chester French’s Lincoln Memorial Statue, below, is apparent). It is interesting that Moran depicted the clean-shaven, youthful Lincoln rather than the bearded figure we all know so well. After finding the log on a friend’s farm and dragging it to his home, he seasoned the wood for three years and then carved the figure from memory over a period of another two years. The result was an astonishing likeness, a monumental piece of folk sculpture, and most importantly for the artist, a suitable companion.

Moran had grown up in Bakersfield working on local farms, married in 1895, and worked in Massachusetts as a woodcarver, carpenter, and cabinetmaker. When he moved back to Vermont in 1917 he also took up carriage making. After his father died, Moran moved to his family farm – alone – and lived there in solitude for the last forty years of his life. There was no electricity, no central heating, and no other modern conveniences. The sign above his door read simply “Frank Moran – Woodcarver.”

Moran became well known locally as a “friendly hermit” and despite his need for privacy he greatly enjoyed entertaining visitors with banjo, fiddle, and storytelling. He kept carving too, embellishing useful items like chests, cabinets, and gun stocks, and also making sculpture busts of political figures (Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler, as well as this small standing figure of George Washington, also in our collection). Some of his finest carvings were made for his local church, St. Anthony’s in East Fairfield.

But the life-size seated figure of Lincoln was Moran’s greatest achievement, and one he vowed never to part with. When offered sizeable sums of money for the piece, he would reply that Old Abe “would never stand up – or leave here.” And so Old Abe remained next to the coal stove in Moran’s kitchen until his maker’s death in 1967, after which it found a new permanent home here at the Fenimore Art Museum.

We have never cleaned off the dark stains left by the proximity to the coal stove, since they are so much a part of the sculpture’s history. It’s nice to think that this might be a comfort to the artist, as well as Old Abe’s continued ability to startle the occasional night watchman.