Born in Galesburg, Illinois, of Swedish immigrant parents, Carl Sandburg found beauty in the ordinary language of the people, the "American lingo," as he called it, and used that language to interpret the republic's frontier past and set it in the context of an industrial present. Much of Sandburg's poetry focused on Chicago, and he was a leading figure in the group of writers from this city who formed the literary movement called the Chicago Renaissance. He also won a Pulitzer Prize for his monumental biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939).

Sandburg was a close friend of William Smith and sat for many portrait sketches, as well as this painted likeness, while visiting the artist's home in Pineville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Smith, who had studied in New York City at the Art Students League in the late 1930s, was a well-known illustrator. In the 1960s he undertook a large mural for the state of Maryland, and in 1973 he designed eight stamps related to the American Revolution for the United States Postal Service.

William A. Smith (1918-1989)
Oil on canvas, 1959
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Gift of the Kent-Lucas Foundation
NPG.80.39

Enlarged image

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