It’s Abraham Lincoln, as you’ve never seen him

Published 9:14 pm Monday, February 2, 2009

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Seated by a window in the Illinois state Capitol in 1860, a beardless, bow-tied Abraham Lincoln held still for 25 seconds for what would become a classic campaign portrait of the soon-to-be president.

It was undoubtedly a personal favorite.

“That looks better and expresses me better than any I have ever seen,” Lincoln, who had recently launched his run for the White House as the Republican nominee, said in a letter to photographer Alexander Hesler.

“If it pleases the people, I am satisfied.”

Twenty years later, images of the slain Civil War leader were in high demand.

Hesler’s wet-plate collodion negative was used to create a high-definition, ­silver-gelatin interpositive — a new-­technology format from which several thousand prints were generated and sold in the late 19th century.

Then in 1933, during shipment by parcel post to St. Louis, the original glass plate was accidentally broken and ended up as a shattered artifact in the Smithsonian Institution’s vault.

But the 8-by-10-inch clone — evidently in the same package and similarly damaged — disappeared.

To mark the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth on Feb. 12, the long-lost positive transparency is now on display at the George Eastman House museum of photography and film.

It was sent there for repair in December 2006 by a Midwestern collector of Lincoln materials who didn’t realize he owned what curators regard as a national treasure. He has declined to be identified.

“This is the closest you will ever get to seeing Lincoln, short of putting your eyeballs on the man himself,” said Grant Romer, an expert on Lincoln images and the museum’s director of photograph conservation.

Next to the best-preserved paper prints, the three-quarter profile — shot with the aid of a head rest in Springfield, Ill., on a quiet Sunday, June 3, 1860 — is striking in its clarity and tonal range.

Visible in the backlit glass plate is every wrinkle and freckle on Lincoln’s lopsided face, the irregular curve of his thick lower lip, unruly hairs in his bushy eyebrows, a mole on the right cheek.

“It’s almost more than you want to see,” Romer said, laughing.

With its dermatological detail, the picture becomes a vital authentication reference.

Lincoln was the first U.S. president to be extensively photographed — more than 125 highly collectible portraits of him survive — and “almost every year, somebody comes forward with a daguerreotype or a tintype or an albumen print from the period in which they think they see Lincoln,” Romer said.

Intricate work went into conserving the rectangular plate, from removing surface dirt and piecing together 26 shards of glass broken in the lower left quadrant to creating a crystal-clear silicone rubber backing to stabilize the fragile glass and installing it in a custom-made wooden display case.

Except for some silver mirroring and flake losses mainly along the cracks, “it’s in remarkably good shape,” said Romer’s deputy, Ralph Wiegandt, a conservator who oversaw the 18-month restoration.