Walt Whitman Archive says: This photograph 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 Thomas Eakins, William O’Donovan, to Whitman’s home and photographed Whitman as an aid to O’Donovan’s sculpting the poet: “they took me hell’s times in all sorts of posishes” (Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Friday, May 1, 1891), Whitman groused, but he was excited about this profile portrait, admiring its “audacity” and its “breadth and beauty both” (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.
The menacing-looking small person to Whitman’s left is actually a statuette of Grover Cleveland, one of two figures of the President that Whitman had in his parlor (they appear in a better light in a photograph of the parlor in John Johnston and J. W. Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891, 1917).
