Abraham Lincoln Reads Emancipation Proclamation
This mint stamp sheet from Palau pictures Cabinet members listening as the President read the Emancipation Proclamation to them for the first time. The design is based on a painting by Francis Bicknell Carpenter.
When Carpenter first heard Lincoln’s landmark proclamation that freed the slaves in the Confederate states, he felt “an intense desire to do something expressive of…the great moral issue involved in the war.” In order to complete the painting, entitled First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, he lived in the White House for four months and used the State Dining Room for his studio.
The oil painting pictures Lincoln surrounded by his Secretaries of War, the Treasury, the Navy, the Interior, and State, and the U.S. Postmaster General and the Attorney General.