[Rarebooks] FS: Swiss Artist Paints Robert E. Lee

[Joslin Hall Rare Books, ABAA]

Buchser, Frank (& Gottfried Walchli).  "Frank Buchser.  Mein Leben und
Streben in Amerika.  Begegnungen und Bekenntnisse eines Schweizer Malers
1866-1871"

Zurich / Leipzig; Orell Fussli Verlag: 1942.

Frank Buchser, a prominent Swiss portrait painter, spent 1866 to 1871 in
the United States.  Generals W.T. Sherman, Robert E. Lee and Nathaniel P.
Banks, as well as politicians Andrew Johnson, William Cullen Bryant, and
William H. Seward (for whom he conceived a great antipathy and contempt)
were all subjects of his brush and his diaries, for he kept copious notes
of his travels and impressions.

Meredith ("The Face of Robert E. Lee in Life and Legend", 1947) notes that
Buchser was "almost fiercely independent in forming his opinions, he was a
man of warm sympathies and strong dislikes".  He spent three weeks in
September and October, 1869 painting Robert E. Lee, and the likeness has
long been praised for the air of vigor, vitality and aggressiveness it
radiates, far from what most photos of Lee at that juncture in his life,
when he was very sick, show.  The secret is that as Buchser worked on
Lee's head he gradually drew his subject out on the topic of Virginia's
secession from the Union.  Day after day he talked to Lee until "the
General relaxed his reserve; soon he was talking freely and in such an
intensity of earnestness that his role as model was quite forgotten... old
fires had risen and broken through, and the artist succeeded in capturing
their glow on his canvas" (Meredith).

Of further interest, although this book retains the original German of
Buchser's notes and diaries, the chapter on his time with Lee contains the
text of a letter he wrote an American friend about the experience, in
English.  The rest of the text, though it is in German, contains much
interesting material about the artist's travels through New York,
Washington, Virginia and the West.

Hardcover.  6.5"x9", 131 pages, 17 b/w plates, several line illustrations
in the text; light wear, a newspaper clipping set in with light
offsetting.  [03516]  $150.00

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