Valentine’s Photograph Reference of Robert E. Lee

In early 1864 Robert E. Lee, dressed in his best military attire, posed for a series of portrait photographs with Richmond photographer Julian Vannerson. Lee and Vannerson mailed several copies of the photographs to Berlin, through the Union’s blockade, so that young Richmond born-sculptor Edward Virginius Valentine, at the time studying sculpture in Berlin, could use them to model a statuette bust of the Confederate general. Valentine drew grid lines in pencil on the photograph to measure perspective and scale—the image itself is smudged and damaged from Valentine’s use of it as a sculptural reference. Valentine wrote in a note on the back of a photograph that his statuette of Lee “was sent to the Liverpool Bazaar for the benefit of the Confederacy. The Statuette was sold & found its way somewhere in Scotland.”