By Stephen Anderson

It is no surprise that several likenesses of Abraham Lincoln are among the nearly 800 pieces of art in the massive private collection of the Union League Club of Chicago.

As its name implies, the 129-year-old club is rooted in patriotic traditions that date back to founding of the Union League of America during the Civil War.

The club’s motto since 1885, emblazoned above the second-floor main lounge fireplace, has been “We join ourselves to no party which does not carry the flag and keep step to the music of the Union.”

Chicago attorney James Bradwell, whose wife was pioneer woman lawyer Myra Colby Bradwell, headed incorporators of the ULCC on Dec. 19, 1879, and several other attorneys have been presidents of the club.

They include ISBA past president Henry L. Pitts, Robert W. Bergstrom, federal defender Terence F. McCarthy, Loyola law professor Frank M. Covey Jr. and David L. Hanson.

Chicago attorneys also have served on the ULCC Art Committee since it was established in 1892, beginning with Ferdinand W. Peck in that year, and continuing more recently with Seymour H. Persky, J. Dillon Hoey and James S. Barber.

John Barton Payne, who chaired the committee in 1895-96 and again in 1901-03, became a Superior Court judge and U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Woodrow Wilson.

It was Payne who obtained the club’s prized Claude Monet oil, “Pommiers en fleurs” (apple trees in blossom), for $500 from an exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago. It hangs outside the entrance to the main lounge on the second floor.

According to legend, the club president at the time thought the Monet wasn’t worth five bucks. Today, of course, its likely value is several million dollars.

Two of the Abraham Lincoln paintings hang in the club’s library. One of them, a 1909 “Portrait of Lincoln” by Ralph Elmer Clarkson, was commissioned by the ULCC for the centennial of the 16th president’s birth.

Clarkson’s work is based on a rare photograph in which the president’s hint of a smile is reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”

Another is “Portrait of Abraham Lincoln,” a 1936 painting by John Doctoroff that was suggested by Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick and reprinted several times in the newspaper.

Based on camera studies by Alexander Gardner, the Doctoroff Lincoln spent two years on the wall of the Washington office of Chicago attorney Samuel K. Skinner when he was U.S. Secretary of Transportation.

A bust of Lincoln in the library is by Leonard Volk, who was a cousin of Stephen A. Douglas by marriage.

An 1879 portrait of “General U.S. Grant” is by William F. Cogswell, whose painting of Abraham Lincoln is on display at the White House.

Behind the desk at the entrance to the ULCC library is a portrait of Luther Laflin Mills (on this page), a founding member of the club and the youngest lawyer to be elected Cook County state’s attorney.

Age 28 when he took office in 1876, Mills served two terms before resuming private practice with a son. The commissioned portrait by Louis P. Betts was done for the Chicago Press Club in 1899, when Laflin was Illinois secretary of state.

The ULCC obtained the painting in 1952 after it was discovered in the trash at Northwestern University by Chester M. MacChesney, board chair of Acme Steel and the brother of a club member.

When the individual who had donated the painting to Northwestern heard of its fate, he tried to reclaim it. His lawsuit was dismissed.

The likenesses of many other lawyers are found throughout the collection. An undated “Portrait of Stephen A. Douglas” by George Peter Alexander Healy also hangs in the library.

The Douglas painting was donated by Thomas B. Bryan, an attorney and judge who was ULCC president in 1897. Bryan’s portrait in the library was done for the club in 1898 by his daughter, Jennie Bird Bryan.

Bryan’s daughter donated Healy’s 1848 “Daniel Webster at Marshfield” to the club in 1903. Another Webster, by Arthur Dawson, is in the collection, along with an 1854 marble bust by Hiram Powers.

A 1954 bust of attorney George Ives Haight is by Kathryn Westerhold Shay. Haight, who took cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, was club president in 1943-44.

Chair of the Art Committee from 1948 to 1955, he was the first president of the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation.

One of the club’s paintings is not of, but by a former Chicago lawyer: Wallace L. DeWolf, who was admitted to the Illinois bar in June 1876. His 1915 work in the clubhouse is “California Coast.”

Daniel Morper, who graduated in 1969 from the Columbia University Law School but took up art in the 1970s, is represented by his 1983 painting, “Zeus,” which depicts a Greenwich Village coffee shop.

The collection includes a portrait of Supreme Court Justice Melville Weston Fuller by Robert Hinckley. Before his court appointment in 1888, Fuller was a Chicago attorney and counsel to the city in litigation over rights to Lake Michigan shore property.

He managed the 1858 Senate campaign of Stephen Douglas against Abraham Lincoln, attended the 1861 Constitutional Convention and served in the Illinois House in 1863-64.

Private docent tours of the Union League Club art collection, for individuals or small groups, may be scheduled by calling the curator’s office at (312) 435-5942.