More fodder for historically misleading photo captions, nicely timed for my Lincolnish week. This "portrait of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln," as the photograph's caption puts it, appeared in our local News-Gazette this past Sunday to accompany a book review about Mary Todd Lincoln. At first glance the Lincolns appear to be together in the same photograph, and the caption absolutely suggests that they are. Except that this is impossible, because there is no extant portrait of them together. What we have here is a pretty straightforward cut and paste job. Somebody - the image is credited to the Associated Press, strangely - simply put together two images of daguerreotypes made during the same time period (mid-1840s). I have no idea why the AP is laying claim to it, because a little googling suggested it's likely the work of DVD package designers for a PBS film about Mary Lincoln.
Other than serving as another nitpicky example of distorted visual history, why does this matter? Well, largely because the discovery of an image of Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln together has been something of a holy grail for Lincoln photo collectors. A few years ago when I started to work on the visual culture of Lincoln, a librarian from our Lincoln collection jokingly sent me an e-Bay link offering what it claimed to be a "newly-discovered photograph" of the Lincolns together. Of course, it was just some random tall skinny dude and his plump wife.
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