The Man
Holmes said of this portrait, which was acquired by the Boston Medical Library at the time of his book collection and displayed in the original Holmes Hall, “It is there; the age is there; the wrinkles are there. It is a likeness. It is the portrait of an old man, dew-lap and all.” He later wrote, “I consider Mr. Billings’ portrait of myself an excellent likeness and so far as I can judge a good painting. I have had many pictures and photographs taken, but it seems to me that no one of them has been so satisfactory as this.”
Made at the request of librarian James Read Chadwick, the bronzed fist of Holmes was displayed in the original Holmes Hall of the Boston Medical Library’s building following the memorial meeting on October 30, 1894. The sculptor, Truman Howe Bartlett, claimed that when asked if he would hold a pen while the mould was being made, Holmes refused and, doubling up his fist like a prizefighter's, said,"Take it that way; that does not show the old man’s wrinkles, does it?"
Medallion of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) for Richard Briggs Co., Boston around 1895.
This illustration was printed in the edition of Ballou’s pictorial for June 20th and depicts the finish of a race of club boats on the Charles at Western Avenue a few days earlier. Holmes “who is very partial to this manly exercise” is shown rowing in the lower left-hand corner.
Sculptor Truman Howe Bartlett made these photographs and measurements of Holmes at the age of 75 with the intention of making a bust, but the project was abandoned as “the necessary sittings were irksome to the subject.” After Holmes’ death, the City of Boston commissioned a bust to be made, and Bartlett secured the work for one of his former students, Richard Edwin Brooks (1865-1919), and passed over to him the glass negatives of the photographs
The original bronze bust was sculpted in Paris by Brooks in 1896 and presented to the Boston Public Library; a copy was made for the Boston Medical Library and placed in Holmes Hall.
According to the BMSJ (1894), v. 131, p. 376, “The portrait of Dr. Holmes which we publish this week is at once an excellent likeness and a very pleasing picture of him in his later years—for us by far the most so of any which we know. The photograph was taken by the Boston sculptor, Bartlett, with a view to making a bust. The design was given up, as the necessary sittings were irksome to the subject, and we are indebted to Mr. Bartlett and Dr. J. R. Chadwick for the right to the picture. It was not easy for the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s chisel to do justice to Dr. Holmes’s mobile features.”
A composite photograph of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Harold C. Ernst
As this letter attests, Holmes was less than enchanted with his composite photograph: “I thank you for them. They are curious, interesting—and fearfully truthful. I do not think much is gained in this instance by the multiple process. I like best the single photograph. That certainly looks like me, and is not to blame for not being more attractive…. but if [Henry Pickering] Bowditch has any curiosity for one of the compound ones, you can let him have it, and welcome.”