JCF Look-alike Contest
Current leader Mark Mysliwiec
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Hi Bob,
I live in Chicago, and a number of years ago
attended conferences at the Union League Club. The
conferences were held on the 2nd floor of the club.
I never paid attention to the art work in the entry
way. During the conference a number of people
gathered outside the room we were in, and pointing
to me and calling for me to join them outside. This
is where the G. P. A Healy portrait of
Frémont hangs. You will understand from
my picture why they were so excited.
I'm a bit older now, and less hair, but the
resemblance is uncanny. I take guests there
specifically to see the painting, and the staff is
always shocked.
Thought you might find it amusing.
Mark Mysliwiec.
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The previous leader in the contest, Captain Jack
Sparrow, has been disqualified for having entered
three times: as Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands,
and as Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet
Street. Tsk, tsk.
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The G. P. A. Healy
portrait
 The
little seen portrait at left by G. P. A. Healy (1813-1894)
is in the collection of the Union
League Club of Chicago. It shows Frémont in the
uniform of a 2nd lieutenant in front of a portion of the
view of the Wind River Range drawn by
Charles Preuss and published in the report of
Frémont's 1842 expedition. Frémont is
represented here as a man of about the 28 years of age that
he was in 1842. It is not known, however, exactly when this
portrait was painted, or if it was done from life.
The
Wind River view used by Healy is the version of the Preuss
drawing not published until 1845, by which time
Frémont had received a double Brevet to Captain, so
the earlier rank depicted is probably to commemorate
expedition and the first measurement of a high mountain peak
in America. It is one of only two portraits that I know of
showing Frémont in the uniform of a second
lieutenant. The other is shown at right. It appears in James
M. Cutts' The Conquest of California and New Mexico,
1847. It is possible that this, an engraving that may have
been done from a daguerreotype (and therefore reversed, or
reversed again by the engraver) was also used as the model
for the Healy painting.
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