The National Portrait Gallery is proud to announce the installation of a life-size painting of President Abraham Lincoln by artist W.F.K. Travers. Created from life in 1865, the 9-foot-tall oil on canvas is one of three known, life-size paintings of the 16th president. The historic work comes to the National Portrait Gallery on long-term loan from the Hartley Dodge Foundation, whose founder, Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, acquired the painting from her family in the 1930s. The Portrait Gallery will display the Travers painting in “America’s Presidents” beginning Feb. 10.

“It is a pleasure to reunite the Travers painting with Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait of George Washington—a highlight of the Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection—roughly 147 years after the two paintings were first displayed together at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia,” said Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery. “Congress debated purchasing the painting for the Capitol on numerous occasions in the late 19th and early 20th century, so it is fitting that the Portrait Gallery was able to bring this work back to Washington, D.C., in collaboration with the Hartley Dodge Foundation.”

“Travers’ painting only adds to the story of the ‘America’s Presidents’ exhibition,” said Nicolas W. Platt, president of the Hartley Dodge Foundation. “It is rich with symbolism that speaks to Lincoln’s history and accomplishments. Next to the Constitution you see the artist’s nod to the Thirteenth Amendment, which Lincoln supported, and the globe in the background is positioned on Haiti, as Lincoln was the first to recognize it as an independent nation in 1862.”