“Gettysburg Address” Etchings with Memorial

Creator

Bernhardt Wall

Preview

Creation Date

1939

Description

These items are two etchings in green ink found in Bernhardt Wall, Following Abraham Lincoln, 1809 – 1865, Vol. 4, Set No. 3, Lime Rock: CT, 1944, [leaves 65 and 66]. The book was etched and printed by the author. One etching is signed in pencil by the artist and author. It is also signed in the print “Wall 1939.” Each print measures 3.75 x 5 inches.

The text on the etchings reads as follows: “ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S ADDRESS – AT GETTYSBURG, PA., NOV. 19,1863. Four score and seven years ago our father’s brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,-- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. The Gettysburg Speech Monument.” Bernhardt Wall etched in these prints the so called “Bliss Copy” of Lincoln’s address, which is regarded as the standard text. The lower portion of the second print contains an image of the Gettysburg Address Memorial in the Gettysburg National Cemetery, which was designed by Louis Henrick and contains a bust of Lincoln made by Henry Kirke Bush-Brown (1912).