After President Lincoln died, there was a huge demand for photos of him lying in his casket. However, the army didn't allow any photos to be taken. As a result, a lot of fake Lincoln death photos appeared. I've
posted about this before, and I have an example of a fake
Lincoln death photo in the Hoax Photo Database.
Mary Curtis just sent me an old newspaper clipping describing some Lincoln death photos owned by her grandmother. Unfortunately, no one knows where the photos are now. According to the clipping, she kept them "in a bank vault in a nearby town."
Actually, reading over the clipping, it's not clear to me whether Mary's grandmother owned photographs or "mourning pictures" (i.e. drawings). The first picture, showing Mrs. Lincoln kneeling before her husband, who is surrounded by his cabinet members, is clearly an illustration, not a photograph.
The second picture seems to be a photograph. The caption says that it shows Mrs. Lincoln standing in front of her husband's coffin. But is that really Mrs. Lincoln? And is she in front of a coffin? It's hard to tell from the quality of this copy.
A third picture is partially visible in the news clipping, but the clipping offers no details about it.
After President Lincoln died, there was a huge demand for photos of him lying in his casket. However, the army didn't allow any photos to be taken. As a result, a lot of fake Lincoln death photos appeared. I've posted about this before, and I have an example of a fake Lincoln death photo in the Hoax Photo Database.
Comments
Mundus vult decipi. [shrug]
The people shown were (I think) all in the room that night, but there was not nearly enough space for all of them at the same time, let alone all of them plus a photographer. (It's a pretty small room.) Besides, Mary Lincoln would have had a major fit the moment the flash went off -- trust me, we'd have known about it from all the stories if this had happened.
The woman in the death-bed picture is definitely Mary Todd Lincoln. But it's not a photograph -- at most, it's a photograph of a lithograph.
http://www.whitehousemuseum.org/floor2/lincoln-bedroom.htm
Interestingly enough, the etching you will see there that directly follows this original etching being discussed here, was another image used to create a fake photo of the President and his council members. In that fabrication, we have well-known photographer, Mathew Brady, actually cannibalizing images from his own original portraits, then joining them together in the same format seen in the etching, seamlessly joining them (or close enough)through the use of some quality lithographic techniques. This fabricated image was then sold to the public as a true photograph of the men under the auspices of his "Mathew Brady Studios."