Francis Bicknell Carpenter - Later Career and Death

Later Career and Death

Following Lincoln's assassination, Carpenter produced many portraits of the President and his family; some based on memory, others on photographs provided by Lincoln’s widow. Carpenter’s skills were in decline by this time. One admirer of Carpenter’s early work wondered if a later portrait of Lincoln was a forgery.

Among the notable portraits painted by Carpenter, aside from Lincoln, were those of President Fillmore and Gov. Myron H. Clarke, painted in the New York City Hall; Horace Greeley (a portrait owned by the Tribune Association); Asa Packer, founder of Lehigh University; James Russell Lowell; New York banker David Leavitt; Dr. Lyman Beecher; Henry Ward Beecher and others.

By the late 1870s, Carpenter became increasingly interested in religion and spirituality; art historian Mary Bartlett Cowdrey believed “that religious obsession somehow undermined Carpenter’s work”. Carpenter died in New York City—a brief obituary appearing in the New York Times misstated the title of his most famous work.

Carpenter died of "dropsy" an old-fashioned term for Edema on May 23, 1900 in New York and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery, Homer, Cortland County, New York.