From The Lincoln Nobody Knows by Richard N. Current:

A couple of years before starting the beard he had referred in public, in his self-deprecating way, to his "poor lean, lank face." His nose was prominent and slightly askew, with "the tip glowing in red," as Herndon noticed. His heavy eyebrows overhung deep eye-caverns in which his eyes - sometimes dreamy, sometimes penetrating - were set. His cheekbones were high, his cheeks rather sunken, his mouth wide, his lips thick, especially the lower one, and his chin upturned. On the right cheek, near his mouth, a solitary mole stood out. His skin was sallow, leathery, wrinkled, dry, giving him a weather-beaten look. He had projecting-some said flapping-ears. His hair was thick and unruly, stray locks falling across his forehead.

The foregoing list of traits hardly adds up to a flattering sum. The physical Lincoln, the external man, was made for caricature, was the delight of cartoonists. But there was more, far more, to Lincoln's appearance than all this. He cannot fairly be depicted by a mere catalogue of his peculiarities. Upon the people he met, he made an impression which no such inventory can convey.

At first glance, some thought him grotesque, even ugly, and almost everyone considered him homely. When preoccupied or in repose he certainly was far from handsome. At times he looked unutterably sad, as if every sorrow were his own, or he looked merely dull, with a vacant gaze. Still, as even the caustic Englishman Dicey observed, there was, for all his grotesqueness, "an air of strength, physical as well as moral, and a strange look of dignity" about him. And when he spoke a miracle occurred. "The dull, listless features dropped like a mask," according to Horace White, an editor of the Chicago Tribune.

"The eyes began to sparkle, the mouth to smile, the whole countenance was wreathed in animation, so that a stranger would have said, 'Why, this man, so angular and somber a moment ago, is really handsome.' " He was "the homeliest man I ever saw," said Donn Piatt, and yet there was something about the face that Piatt never forgot. "It brightened, like a lit lantern, when animated."

Here was a Lincoln the camera never caught. When he went to the studio and sat before the lens he invariably relapsed into his sad, dull, abstracted mood. No wonder. He had to sit absolutely still, with his head against the photographer's rack, while the tedious seconds ticked by. It took time to get an image with the slow, wet-plate process of those days. There was then no candid camera, no possibility of taking snapshots which might have recorded Lincoln at his sparkling best. "I have never seen a picture of him that does anything like justice to the original," said Henry Villard, the New York Herald reporter. "He is a much better looking man than any of the pictures represent."

The portrait painters were hardly more successful. "Lincoln's features were the despair of every artist who undertook his portrait," his private secretary John G. Nicolay declared. A painter might measure the subject, scrutinize him in sitting after sitting, and eventually produce a likeness of a sort. But "this was not he who smiled, spoke, laughed, charmed," said Nicolay. The poet Walt Whitman commented after getting a close-up view: "None of the artists or pictures have caught the subtle and indirect expression of this man's face." And again, some years after Lincoln's death: "Though hundreds of portraits have been made, by painters and photographers (many to pass on, by copies, to future times), 1 have never seen one yet that in my opinion deserved to be called a perfectly good likeness; nor do 1 believe there is really such a one in existence."

The word pictures do much to supply what the photographs and paintings missed, yet these descriptions also fail to show the man complete. All who tried to describe him admitted that (he phenomenal mobility and expressiveness of his features, the reflections of his complex and wide-ranging personality, were beyond the power of words. "The tones, the gestures, the kindling eye, and the mirth-provoking look defy the reporter's skill," the reporter Noah Brooks confessed after seeing Lincoln deliver the Cooper Union speech (1860).

Beyond a certain point Lincoln's appearance not only defied description; it also baffled interpretation. "There is something in the face which I cannot understand," said Congressman Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts. And the leader of German Americans in Illinois, Gustave Koerner, remarked: "Something about the man, the face, is unfathomable."

In his looks there were hints of mysteries within.