I’ve read about Henry Farny caricaturing Jefferson Davis in 1865 with a sketch that went “viral” in its day, but I could never hunt down the actual image. Now, with help from the November 1880 edition of the “American Art Review”, I feel confident the image shown below is Farny’s work.
The Art Review’s article, “Cincinnati Artists of the Munich School“, includes a description of the Jefferson Davis cartoon created by Farny:
“[Farny’s] inclinations were towards the study of art, which he began in his eighteenth year, his first efforts being in the shape of decorations on water-coolers. He afterwards became a designer for lithographers, one of his widely known productions of that period being a caricature of the escape of Jefferson Davis, clothed in the dress of a woman and engaged in the act of climbing a fence“
With those details, I was able to track down a cartoon at the Smithsonian Institute called “The Confederacy in Petticoats” that embodies the above description and, moreover, one for which there is no identified artist, nor do any of the newspaper reports that reference the drawing attach any artist to it. I could imagine that, if Farny did indeed create this drawing, the lack of credit to him would have would seared into his psyche the need to sign all his works.
Here is an example of one article out of Richmond, Indiana, that described the “The Confederacy in Petticoats”.
While there are other examples of artists who caricatured Jefferson Davis dressed in his wife’s petticoat, I can find only one other image that involves Davis climbing a fence and it appears to be a bad copy of the original above. Note how Davis’ left foot and leg are wedged oddly through the fence rails. Given all the Farny’s illustrations I’ve seen, this doesn’t look like his work to me. This image appears on Wikimedia:
