A HAPPY MR. LINCOLN

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S craggy, compassionate countenance, crinkling with humor and graven by tragedy, is as familiar to most Americans as the faces of their own grandfathers. The first great photographer, Matthew Brady, portrayed Lincoln many times in the course of the Civil War, and generations of schoolboys have studied Brady's portraits. Few ever saw the beardless, relatively untried Lincoln opposite, which was displayed with a Lincoln's Birthday flourish this week in Washington's Corcoran Gallery.

The picture's shadowy history was pieced together recently by Art Historian Katharine McCook Knox. A Chicago promoter commissioned the canvas from the most fashionable portraitist of the day, George Peter Alexander Healy, just after the 1860 elections. Healy buttonholed the President-elect at Springfield, got him to sit three times. A visiting politician dropped by the senate chamber in Springfield's old statehouse to watch one of the sittings, later described the scene: "He [Lincoln] sat to the artist with his right foot on top of the left and both feet turned inward--pigeon fashion--round-shouldered--looking grim as fate, sanguinity his expression, occasionally breaking into a broad grin ... He chatted, told stories, laughed at his own wit--and the humor of others--and in one way and another made a couple of hours pass merrily and never once lost his dignity or committed himself to an opinion ... It is a good painting--but only a tolerable likeness." The beardless Lincoln was one of 15 Healy portraits of U.S.

Presidents bought by the Corcoran in 1879. After a time, the unappreciated series was sent to the cellar, then dispersed by loans to various District of Columbia schools. Twelve years ago, the paintings were at last recalled to the Corcoran. Cleaned and hung in the gallery, Healy's Lincoln slowly began gaining the attention it deserves. "This," wrote Expert Duncan Phillips last year, "is a happy Lincoln ... It is a disarmingly personal impression of the eyes of true greatness at a moment when they were lighted with the surprise, the honor and the vision of supreme opportunity." Lesser matters than the presidency could light Lincoln's eyes and give him ideas. Portraitist Healy (who died in 1894) recalled that Lincoln burst out laughing in the midst of one sitting, over a letter from a critical little girl. Lincoln asked Healy to pass on it: "As a painter, Mr. Healy, you should be a judge between this unknown correspondent and me. She complains of my ugliness. It is allowed to be ugly in this world, but not as ugly as I am. She wishes me to put on false whiskers, to hide my horrible lantern jaws. Will you paint me with false whiskers? No?" Despite the levity, Lincoln grew whiskers before arriving at the White House, was never again painted clean-shaven.

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