In the article about the Lincoln portrait model held by the ANS it was suggested by the writer that this was a preliminary model for the Lincoln Cent, but I don't believe that is correct. It is stylistically more similar to the various Lincoln medals and plaquettes that Brenner produced for years and which provided him with an income for the remainder of his life. The most obvious difference is the treatment of Lincoln's hair, which is shown on the ANS piece to be wavy, rather than curly, as on the cent. Wavy hair is far more accurate to photographs of Lincoln, and the cent has always been among Brenner's poorest representations of our 16th president.

I'm including images of framed photos that I have in my office and which appeared in my book on Lincoln Cents. These show the models that Brenner submitted to the U. S. Mint for the cent. They were, of course, modified for the final hubs, but they clearly reveal that Lincoln already had his curly hair which is seemingly unique to the coin.

I apologize for both the oblique angle and the uneven lighting, but these are framed in such a way that it would be very difficult to remove them for scanning.

Victor D. Brenner made the plaster profile of Abraham Lincoln working from photographs by Anthony Berger, manager of Brady’s Washington, DC gallery. Berger made seven poses at this sitting, Feb 9, 1864, and Brenner combined two of them in designing our Lincoln Cent 44 years later. They are identified as O-88 and O-89, and these notes are taken from “LINCOLN IN PHOTOGRAPHS, An Album of Every Known Pose” by Charles Hamilton and Lloyd Ostendorf, Morningside, Dayton, Ohio, 1985.