Auction Buyers Decide Photo of Lincoln Is Dishonest Abe

The portrait shows a lanky, cleanshaven young man in his Sunday best. But was it an honest Abe?

Buyers didn’t think so, and the 1843 daguerreotype that some say is one of the earliest known images of Abraham Lincoln failed to sell at an auction last Tuesday.

“It’s a fitting ending and just closure to the piece,” dealer and daguerreotype collector William L. Schaeffer said. “Probably fewer than 1% of any collectors or experts ever believed it was a Lincoln.”

The daguerreotype, titled “Portrait of a Gentleman, Believed to be Abraham Lincoln,” was taken off the Christie’s auction block after it failed to make the minimum bid. The minimum was not disclosed, but the high bid was $150,000. Christie’s had estimated that it would sell for at least $200,000.

Schaeffer said that if the picture was really of Lincoln, it would be worth $3 million to $5 million, but no one was willing to take the gamble.

The 3 1/2-by-3-inch daguerreotype, a mirror-image photograph produced on silver or copper, had been the subject of heated dispute since it surfaced in 1992.

Some historians said Lincoln could have posed for the picture while serving in the Illinois House of Representatives, when he would have been 33 or 34. But doubters said it simply does not look like the Great Emancipator.

The features of the man in the picture are vastly different from Lincoln’s, they said, pointing to the ears, nose, shoulders and eyes. Some went so far as to compare the veins in the hands, claiming that they do not match a cast of Lincoln’s hands made in 1860.

Doubters were not swayed when a computer program used to identify what missing children may look like years later supposedly matched the daguerreotype with three Lincoln portraits.

The daguerreotype’s owners, collectors Robert and Joan Hoffman, bought the picture in 1992 for an undisclosed amount from a New York antiques dealer. The dealer who sold it to the Hoffmans got it from the Hay-Wadsworth family, whose ancestor, John Milton Hay, was Lincoln’s assistant secretary.

That did not matter to Paul Hertzmann, a California dealer.

“It didn’t sell because it wasn’t a Lincoln,” he said. “End of story.”