Smithsonian

Highlights from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture

“Walt Whitman is the founding spirit of this show,” says Ward. During the Civil War, Whitman, whose poetry collection Leaves of Grass contains themes of free love, worked as a nurse in the Patent Office Building, which is now the National Portrait Gallery. Thomas Eakins took this photograph a year before the poet’s death in 1891.

Walt Whitman by Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

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Photos from: Portrait Gallery's Hide/Seek Uncovers an Intricate Visual History of Gay Relationships »