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Primary sourcePainting1841

William Henry Harrison, American Pocket Library of Useful Knowledge

Thomas Curtis Clarke · 1841

An engraved oval portrait of Harrison printed in a popular reference book of 1841, made during his lifetime.

Shows Harrison as he was presented to readers in a popular reference book published in the year he took office.

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Engraved oval portrait of an older man with swept-back hair, deep-set eyes, and a high collar, shown from the shoulders up within a decorative rectangular border with line-hatched shading.
Thomas Curtis Clarke, William Henry Harrison, engraving in American Pocket Library of Useful Knowledge, 1841.

About this source

What it is

This is an engraved portrait of Harrison published in 1841 in the American Pocket Library of Useful Knowledge. The image is an oval head-and-shoulders portrait of an older man with swept-back hair, deep-set eyes, and a high collar, set inside a decorative rectangular border with line-hatched shading. The record credits Thomas Curtis Clarke as the creator.

Why it matters

A small reference book like this one was meant to be used by ordinary readers. Printing a portrait of a sitting or former president in such a book shows that Harrison was widely known by 1841, the year he took office. The engraving gives students a sense of how a public figure was presented in print to a general audience of the time.

Look closer

  • What does the decorative border suggest about how the publisher wanted readers to see Harrison?
  • Why might a reference book include a portrait of a person at all?
  • What can an engraving show about a face, and what can it not show?

This painting is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of William Henry Harrison on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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