Harding, Chester "Daniel Webster"

Chester Harding.  “Daniel Webster.” 

Ca. 1850.  Engraving by Joseph Andrews and Hezekiah Wright Smith.  25 x 17 1/4.  Very good impression and condition.

A superb mezzotint of Webster from a painting (now in the Boston Athenæum) by Chester Harding (1792-1886). Beginning his career on the American frontier as an itinerant portrait painter, Harding went on to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Design, work in St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and London, before ending up to a successful career in Boston. Harding produced paintings of many of the important figures of the mid-nineteenth century, including a number of Webster, of which this is considered one of the best ever done of this great American statesman. Webster, who served as Secretary of State and in the Senate for many years, was perhaps the great orator of the mid-nineteenth century.