The canvas lay in a box of junk in an Alexandria, Va., secondhand store. But when Christine du Tant, wife of a U.S. Senate aide, unrolled it, she recognized the handsome young man it portrayed and bought it for $3. A curator of the Smithsonian Institution agreed with her: the small (10 in. by 14 in.) oil by an unknown artist is indeed of the young Abraham Lincoln, painted around 1840, and thus the earliest-known likeness of the future President. He had just turned 30 at the time and was a frontier legislator and lawyer in the midst of his...
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