President Lincoln - 1862
Copyright Albert Kaplan 1983
(click on image for the
full daguerreotype plate)
Posted on 02/13/2007 3:32:34 PM PST by PJ-Comix
President Lincoln - 1862 |
Copyright Albert Kaplan 1983 (click on image for the full daguerreotype plate) |
In 1977 Albert Kaplan purchased the daguerreotype receipted as "Portrait of a Young Man" from an art gallery in New York. "When I first saw it I thought that there were similarities between the handsome, aristocratic, and tastefully groomed young man of the daguerreotype, and my mental image of President Lincoln."
Over the years Kaplan researched and assembled materials which cast light on the physical man, Lincoln. Kaplan believed that the best qualified people to analyze the image, and the assembled materials, to consider whether the daguerreotype is of Abraham Lincoln, would be plastic and reconstructive surgeons who work with the human face. In 1987 Kaplan, then living in Paris, sought out Dr. Claude N. Frechette, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the American Hospital in Paris, whose report "A New Lincoln Image" is here included. A second report, "Artifact Description of Kaplan Daguerreotype", is by Grant B. Romer, Conservator of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography & Film in Rochester, New York.
The only other known, and hitherto earliest, daguerreotype of Lincoln, Meserve #1, in the possession of the Library of Congress, was a gift of Robert Todd Lincoln to Frederick Hill Meserve. Meserve reported that "Lincoln believed it was made in Washington in 1848".
In 1965, the New York Academy of Sciences published "Abraham Lincoln's Philosophy Of Common Sense - An Analytical Biography of a Great Mind", by Edward J. Kempf, M.D., a neurologist and psychiatrist whose interest in Lincoln began when he first saw the Volk life mask, from which he inferred that Lincoln must have suffered a serious cranial injury in childhood. After investigating further, Dr. Kempf found Lincoln's own account of having been kicked in the forehead by a horse at age 10 years and "thought dead for awhile." The nature of the cerebral damage, and how it might have influenced the development of Lincoln's personality and mind became a question of absorbing interest to the author. The resulting analytical biography was the product of the author's 12 subsequent years of research.
Because the trauma-induced deformations of Lincoln's face, distinctly described by Dr. Kempf, are seen unmistakably in the Kaplan daguerreotype, providing in themselves compelling evidence in support of the daguerreotype's authenticity, we reprint the Kempf analysis (from the title page to the end of Chapter I of Volume I).
An earlier Kempf study of Lincoln's cranial injury appeared in the April 1952 American Medical Association (AMA) Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, Volume 67, Number 4, entitled, "Abraham Lincoln's Organic and Emotional Neurosis".
An earlier Kempf study of Lincoln's cranial injury appeared in the April 1952 American Medical Association (AMA) Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, Volume 67, Number 4, entitled, "Abraham Lincoln's Organic and Emotional Neurosis".
I don't know if there is any biometric comparison to validate this photograph. Kaplan is loopy, IMO.
Cheek bone structure seems all wrong. I don't buy it.
You're joking, right?
Gads. And we think Obama has big ears!
Oops! I meant YOU don't buy it. Not the other guy. Take a look at the 1848 Lincoln pic above. The cleft chins are identical. Besides, the Lincoln in the first picture is only in his early 30s. Naturally Lincoln that young would look like our image of "Lincoln." The only one who looked the same old as young was maybe Churchill who had a baby face.
He could trounce someone wrestling, too. Which he did, often while he was serving in the military.
LOL, thanks for the laugh.
Nope. Look at the nose, ear structure, and especially cleft chin. Also read the article. That photo was analyzed by professionals.
Me, either. The younger photo is creepy, while the wedding photo is not. It's a good try, though.
One difference MAY be the disease that Mr. Lincoln was supposed to have had. It may have stretched out his facial structure, I doubt it.
Fine, you can have the chins. Look how much higher the ears are above the jawbone on Lincoln. And how the daguerrotype subject's ears are at a slight angle compared to Lincoln's. I don't know what they're called, but the lines created by the front of the cheekbones coming away from the nose on Lincoln are nowhere to be seen on the other subject. Add to that the fact that this second image of Lincoln you're offering shows him to be about the same age as the subject in the daguerrotype, and no great amount of sleuthing is necessary to determine that they're not the same man.
Can anybody see what the "serious cranial injury" is? I can't.
Most young men have a bit of dandyism in them. Moses probably looked like a bit of a dandy when young. A beard and time really does change an appearance. However, the basic facial structures are the same in all the pictures. Nose, ears, and, especially cleft chin. Also note the identical bulging cheek bones in the pictures.
The ravages of the elements(?) on the skin are very dramatic, I think, too.
No Lincoln descendants. Only one of four kids made it into adulthood, Robert, who went on to be ambassador to Britain and Sec. of War. His kids did not have kids.
There's a definite similarity between the two pictures.
How much is because of the identical pose and angle, though?
I wouldn't take the Kaplan and Meserve Lincolns for the same person.
Try this one:
I see the uncanny similarity in the nose, but there are differences as well.
Marfan syndrome
Marfan syndrome is an inherited disorder of connective tissue, although about one-quarter of all cases occur without any family history of the syndrome.
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