Walt Whitman Archive says: This photograph was ascribed to Thomas Eakins when it was printed in the Small, Maynard edition of Leaves (1898), and it is very similar to two other photographs, the second of which is clearly ascribed to Samuel Murray. At this point, Whitman had a wolf-skin draped across the back of his rocker in the first-floor parlor of his home, where this was taken.
In May of 1891, Murray accompanied the New York sculptor and friend of Eakins, William O’Donovan, to Whitman’s home and photographed Whitman as an aid to O’Donovan’s sculpting the poet: “they took hell’s times in all sorts of posishes,” Whitman groused, but he was excited about this profile portrait, admiring its “audacity” and its “breadth and beauty both” (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Tuesday, May 19, 1891), calling it “an artist’s picture in the best sense” (Saturday, May 23, 1891 ).
In a group portrait of Murray, Eakins, and O’Donovan (along with Eakins’s dog, Harry) taken at Eakins’s studio on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, the nearly completed bust of Whitman can be seen over O’Donovan’s shoulder (see Ed Folsom and Ted Genoways, VQR, “The Last Photographs”). Tacked to the wall next to the bust is one of Jacob Spieler’s portraits of Whitman, one unidentified close-up portrait, and at least four smaller prints from Murray’s session. Though Murray’s photographs were intended merely as studies, they are especially important because they are the last photographs taken of Whitman before his death in March 1892.
