JCF Look-alike Contest
Current leader Mark Mysliwiec

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.

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.


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.

home page
Bob Graham