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Extremely rare portrait engraving of William Henry Harrison, approximately 1.25 x 1.75, signed in ink beneath the image, “Gen. W. H. Harrison.” The signature is penned on an integral tab left in place when the engraving was trimmed at an early date. The engraving is, in turn, affixed to the front free end page of the book Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes, Contrasted with Real Christianity by William Wilberforce (New York: American Tract Society, no date; circa 1830), quarter-leather-bound hardcover, 3.75 x 6, 375 pages. The engraving and signature are in good to very good condition, with slight blot to first letter, light soiling, small edge tears to image, and close trimming to signature as noted above. The book itself exhibits typical rubbing and light wear to covers, scattered staining and spotting to interior, and the front cover is mostly detached (though easily restorable).
The extreme rarity of any signed image of Harrison can hardly be exaggerated. Photography was in its nascent stages at the time of Harrison's 1841 death, and the history of the presidential signed photograph can be traced to the 1860s, when the elderly Martin Van Buren became the earliest president to sign his photographic likeness.
The standard reference The Sanders Price Guide to Autographs notes no documented signed image of a president prior to Van Buren, aside from an engraving signed by John Quincy Adams; in his book History Comes to Life, Kenneth Rendell rates this same Adams image as “very rare.” Significantly, neither Sanders nor Rendell makes mention of a signed Harrison image at all, aside from the comment in Sanders that “there are no known SPs of W. H. Harrison.”
