| Can we identify a portrait without ever using an argument based on resemblance? That is the challenge posed in this article.
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In our first episodes we sketched the portrait of a young village photographer on the banks of the Erie Canal, John B. Roberts — the hero, as it were, of our serial, then the rather extraordinary story of how the single surviving copy of a small-town newspaper turned up, and we described the passengers on the train, potential witnesses of the photographic event. Now this fourth episode proposes a method to test today the possible result of this 1861 event, with four precisely-designed tests, none of them addressing the model’s identity: a plate that passes all of them remains an outdoor daguerreotype—compatible with Clyde’s—of an unknown man. The Latent Image: Toward a Method for a Lost Daguerreotype There are moments in an investigation when the decisive fact already exists, yet remains inaccessible to perception. In the language of nineteenth-century photography, this is a latent image: present on the exposed plate, but still invisible. At such a moment, everyone is blind. There are only gestures, a few words reported and printed; and an object whose existence, though perhaps already secured, remains mysterious to every person involved. At Clyde, on the morning of 18 February 1861, that moment lasted less than five minutes. The presidential train stopped in the cold. Abraham Lincoln appeared on the rear platform. A crowd had gathered near the depot. After his brief greeting, Lincoln re-entered the car. As departure approached, the accounts begin to diverge—not necessarily because one of them is false, but because each observer occupied a different position in relation to a scene moving faster than any one of them could fully record. Somewhere beside the rear car, an apparatus had been placed upon a pile of timber near the rails. Tinsley, writing in the Lyons Republican, recorded that an ambitious artist wished to daguerreotype the President-elect and asked that he remain still long enough to permit the attempt.
Yet no one present could have known whether an image had been obtained. Not Tinsley, who reported the incident in the Lyons Republican. Not the people gathered on the platform, nor the inauguration reporters in their heated passenger car. Not Lincoln himself, standing before the camera. Not even, in the strictest sense, the operator behind it. For a daguerreotype does not reveal its latent image at the instant of exposure. The chemical image might begin to emerge within minutes once the operator had reached a prepared mercury box. But in the conditions of Clyde on 18 February 1861, snow, cold, a temporary outdoor working position, a departing train, and the need to return to a sheltered workspace, maybe an hour before the plate could be developed, fixed, washed, dried, and safely examined was entirely plausible. By the time the plate began to declare itself, Lincoln’s train would be well on its way, the crowd dispersed, and the photographer alone with the result of his experiment. Whether that moment came before or after 9:30 am is less important than the fact that it came far from the platform, and after every witness had lost the means of knowing the outcome. I state this not merely as a matter of photographic history, but from experience. I have followed the advice of older investigators and asked help to practise the daguerreotype process under conditions comparable to those of the nineteenth century, as I did with other photographic processes, to discuss every step of the “Crime scene” and think while experimenting. Even under orderly circumstances, the complete operation requires time, concentration, equipment, shelter, and patience.
The conditions described at Clyde were: severe cold, a brief halt, and an operator working with half preparation, half improvisation. The problem was not merely chemical. It was spatial. Where did the engine halt in relation to the water-tank and the wood-pile? How long was the new passenger car? At what point along the platform would its rear end have stood? The local papers, unexpectedly, preserve several clues. They tell us that the locomotive was wooding and watering; that it moved toward the water-house; and that Pain remained on board until the lower crossing. These are not picturesque details. They are measurements in disguise. The result could not have been known before the operator had found shelter, warmth, and the dangerous privacy required by his chemicals, and plate had been properly developed, fixed, washed, and stabilised. The visible gesture, the man standing still before the lens, was only the beginning. If an image was made at Clyde, it was born unseen. It was singular. It was slow. It was private in its making even when its exposure took place before a crowd.
Three Main Witnesses, Three Blindnesses The surviving accounts do not describe one perfectly unified scene. They should not be forced to do so. William T. Tinsley, writing in the Lyons Republican, described an artist who had prepared to daguerreotype Lincoln. He recorded the request that the President-elect remain still long enough to allow the attempt. He noted the engraved likeness given to the ambitious photographer. But he did not say whether the exposure succeeded (Partita-doppia issue 2). That silence is significant, but it is not negative evidence. Tinsley’s attention rests, rather, upon Lincoln’s willingness. The President-elect, he says, “willingly complied” and waited “on the platform”. The phrase appears in relation to local boys who had prepared a cannon, and can refer as well to the photographer, who is thanked with a small engraved portrait. Lincoln accepted these small demonstrations of local enthusiasm. Yet the two actions were fundamentally unlike. The firing of a cannon produced an immediate and public result. The sound announced itself to everyone. The exposure of a daguerreotype produced no such proof. It was an act whose result remained hidden from the crowd, from the journalists, from Lincoln, and even from the operator until the chemical work had been completed.
Joseph Howard of the New York Times gave another account. He did not call the process a daguerreotype, and he did not describe a formal posed portrait. Yet he did report pictures in which Lincoln was included. He referred to an “enterprising artist” who “had placed upon a convenient wood-pile a camera with which he secured pictures of the rear end of the car, of Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Wood, a brakeman, and an unlucky reporter.” This is not precisely Tinsley’s scene. Howard gives more details on the train passengers and mentions the intervention of Joseph Pain just before the photographic event, and, just after, Mr. Lincoln great desire of rest after a very short night: “Mr Paine (sic), editor of the local paper, approached Mr. Lincoln, and said that he had been deputed by the assemblage to shake him by the hand – which shake he would distribute in the next morning’s edition”. “There being something like an hour’s time before the train would reach Syracuse, Mr. Lincoln availed himself of the sleeping apartment, to secure a few moments’ rest”.
The third reporter is both the most detailed and the most silent. Joseph A. Pain, of the Clyde Weekly Times, may well be the “unlucky reporter” mentioned by Howard. The identification is attractive, and likely, but will remain provisional until the chronology can be tied together more securely. Pain was physically nearer still. Thus the closest witness may have been the least able to see what matters most to us, or may have decided to omit in his otherwise detailed report printed and published only five days later: On Saturday, February 23, 1861, five days after the presidential visit, Joseph A. Pain described Lincoln’s Brief Stop in Clyde in the Clyde Weekly Times: “On Monday morning, bright and early, notwithstanding the heavy snow and deep drifts of Saturday night and Sunday morning, the roads in every direction were filled with teams and leads of human beings coming to see the President-elect. The village streets were thronged with vehicles, and by eight o’clock a large concourse of people were assembled at the depot, anxiously awaiting the Presidential train. At 8.40 AM the train hove in sight, the work engine whistled, the canon belched forth its thunder notes, and every man, woman and child was agog with excitement. Nobly the train sped along; and as it moved towards the waterhouse the crowd closed in behind, and watched for the signs of the ‘coming man’. As soon as the train stopped, six feet four of humanity stepped out of the car, and when on the platform, an enthusiastic cheer greeted Hon. Abraham Lincoln, President elect of the U. S.” Lincoln spoke only briefly: “Ladies and gentlemen: I merely appear before you to say good morning and farewell. I did not come to make a speech; nor have I time to make one if I did. I now bid you good morning, and when the train starts I will come out again and bid you farewell.” “When Mr. Lincoln re-entered the car, we again got upon the platform and conversed with Mr. Wood during the short period occupied in wooding and watering. As soon as the locomotive whistled for starting, Mr. Lincoln stepped out upon the platform, and saying, — ‘I bid you all farewell’ — bowed several times to the crowd, who returned the greeting with enthusiastic cheers. We were then introduced by Mr. Wood, to the president elect, and shaking hands with him, said, we would disperse the shake to our readers in our next edition. During this time the cars were in motion, and when we reached the lower crossing we parted company …” Pain may be Howard’s “unlucky reporter.” His account makes the identification plausible, since it places him on the rear platform and then aboard the departing train. Wayne Morrison, the local historian of Clyde, records that the story of a reporter’s fall was passed down through several generations of local memory, a tradition that supports the identification without, by itself, proving it. Pain confirms he was very close to the President-elect on the platform on another page of the Clyde Weekly Times: “We stood by Mr. Lincoln’s side when he was bidding the crowd farewell, and to give some idea of his height, our head reached about half way between his elbow and shoulder; and though not tall, we are not among the smallest race of bipeds.”
Three Witnesses First Witness, Tinsley gives us an intended daguerreian portrait, for which Lincoln was asked to remain motionless. Second Witness, Howard gives us a view, apparently broader, involving several people upon the rear platform. Third Witness, Pain confirms the movements of the train and the gestures on the rear platform. He does not mention the photographer. The easy solution would be to decide that one or two men were mistaken. We can resist that impulse. A few minutes on 18 February 1861, at a rear car platform, could contain several overlapping actions: a camera being carried or adjusted; Lincoln appearing briefly twice; an operator asking him to stand; a reporter moving toward the platform; a printed likeness being handed over; the train preparing to depart. Neither account need be complete. Each may preserve a fragment from a crowded and hurried scene that no single observer could see in full. The apparent disagreement is not a defect to be concealed. It is the shape of the event itself, because of each relative position.
What Each Man Could See Tinsley was not a passenger on the presidential train, which had not stopped at Lyons a few miles before Clyde. He was an observer on the ground, outside the official party but free to place himself near the scene. Howard travelled with the national press. He was on the train, but a scheduled brief halt for wood and water in bitter weather did not give him freedom to leave his press car, nor to reach and cross all over the final carriage, reserved for Lincoln, his family, and his immediate suite. His account may contain details obtained from the window; it may also contain details passed along inside the train. Unlike the other two, he is a regular on the train, where he stays for more than a week. Pain did not name the photographer. Yet the issue in which his report appeared also carried the regular advertisement of John B. Roberts’ Daguerrean Gallery, located across Glasgow Street from the Clyde Weekly Times office.
The juxtaposition does not identify Roberts as the operator. It establishes, however, the close local world in which the event occurred, and the proximity of a working daguerreian practitioner to the newspaper that recorded it. But this is a familiar difficulty in historical inquiries: Nearness is not knowledge. A man may stand two yards from a camera and know nothing of what the plate received. Another may be inside the train and know who stood on the platform. A third may record the event carefully, yet remain unable to answer the only question that later generations will ask: did the image survive? Their accounts should not be flattened into one convenient report. Their differences establish the true geometry of the scene. To put it simply, three legs that are not aligned are what make a stool or a tripod sturdy.
The Method Triangle Now let’s try to formulate the method in a somewhat bold way while remaining mathematically correct. We have three accounts, one of which has been widely reproduced without variation in several East Coast newspapers (the one from The New York Times). We have three contemporary accounts with distinct points of observation. They appear totally or, at least partly independent as the routes followed by those witnesses diverged after 8:49. If the 8:48 a.m. photograph exists, could it coexist with all three accounts and suddenly make them compatible? The three accounts form a triangulation. Each fixes a different limit: Tinsley records the request for a daguerreotype; Howard records a camera on the wood-pile and pictures involving the rear platform; Pain fixes the sequence of Lincoln’s appearances and the train’s movement. The hypothesis survives only if it can remain compatible with all three limits at once. We cannot yet prove that such a photograph survives. But if it does, the three accounts considerably narrow the window within which it must have been made.
The Presence of Lamon Ward Hill Lamon was one of Lincoln’s closest companions. As several passengers later recalled, he served not only as a personal bodygard during the inauguration trip but also as a liaison between train cars, informing journalists about events in the presidential car. It is natural to imagine that he must have known everything that occurred near the President-elect. We can suppose Lamon’s role concerns the gift of an engraved likeness to the photographer outside the rear platform, that does not make him a witness to the photographic exposure. He may have appeared only when Lincoln was returning to the carriage. In that case he could have seen, arranged, or remembered the distribution of a printed portrait without having captured in detail the operator’s work. This distinction matters. An investigation must not create extra witnesses merely by repeating a detail through several voices. Ten published accounts do not always represent more than three independent observations. A detail can pass through a single member of the suite, from a railway employee to a reporter, from a reporter to another paper, until it appears to have acquired a false multiplicity. A method deserves confidence not only when it establishes something, but when it marks the boundaries of what it does not yet know. At Clyde, the photographic event was public, but its result was private. The witnesses could describe the attempt; none could certify the image. That distinction is not an inconvenience in the evidence. It is the beginning of the method. A Plate at the Watson Hotel More than a century and a half later, a small anonymous plate appeared in New York, at the Watson Hotel, at a modest and specialized table fair organized during the famous and fashionable AIPAD fair. The daguerreian portrait bore no name. During the fair, the plate was visible to dealers, collectors, curators, and historians of American photography. It had also appeared in online listings during the preceding months. So far as I have been able to establish, it was neither offered nor publicly discussed as an image of Abraham Lincoln.
No one spontaneously identified the unsold piece as Abraham Lincoln. Nor did I. When I became interested in it, I did not believe that I was acquiring an unknown portrait of Lincoln. Usually, with years passing, I refrain from looking for anything precise in particular, especially anything famous. I saw an intriguing object: a man with a discreet smile in a tall beaver hat, in respectable but homely dress, caught in an image that seemed unlike the familiar, settled iconography of Lincoln. I noticed that several people had quietly approached while I was expressing my interest in this work. No name had been suggested. No theory had been advanced. With the young dealer, our conversation touched only on the plate’s physical condition—its stains, its corrosion, its wear. The sale was easily concluded. In that exact moment, one collector, in a sigh that cannot be replicated: “Hoo, I collect rare top hats and I miss that one” . Then, about a minute later, Olivier D. returned and cried out in French, loudly enough to turn heads across the room: “It is him! It is him!” The cry is a fact. It is not evidence. It came after the purchase, and therefore could not have shaped the price or created the commercial interest in the object. Yet it should not be erased as though it were meaningless.
The question became more serious only because of the date at which it led: the narrow historical moment when Lincoln’s beard was beginning to transform his public appearance, while the daguerreotype itself was disappearing as an American photographic practice. That coincidence is not a decisive proof. But it makes the inquiry worth undertaking. Here again, we can apply a geometric line of reasoning: When Lincoln decided to grow a beard, he didn’t really follow any model. On the other hand, as soon as his bearded portrait became widespread, many Americans wanted to look like him. It is difficult to imagine a sitter, before 1861, deliberately cultivating a beard that would later become instantly recognisable as Lincoln’s—since Lincoln himself had not yet grown it, and no one imitates a face that does not yet exist. Any resemblance in a pre-1861 daguerreotype would therefore be either coincidence, or a beard grown for entirely unrelated reasons that happened to converge with Lincoln’s own late transformation. Lincoln’s decision coincides with the very last period when daguerreotypes were still being taken in rural America. The coincidence creates a narrow historical window, not an identification. Lincoln’s changing appearance and the late survival of rural daguerreian practice make the hypothesis testable in a way that a generic unidentified portrait would not be.
What Changed Since 2025 In 2025, I published the investigation describing the plate as a portrait of a man bearing a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. The phrase was not false. But it placed resemblance at the centre of the case. Today, resemblance can begin an inquiry. It cannot conclude one. The appearance of an old portrait from physical world changes with light, angle, surface deterioration, reproduction, beard, age, memory, expectation, and desire. What has changed since then is not the plate. It is the question asked of the plate. The question is no longer: Can this man be recognised as Lincoln? In the first months of 2026 was discovered the only copy in existence of the Lyons Republican, giving precise details on a photographic event ocured in Clyde on the morning of Monday 18 February 1861. The question now is: Can a plate of this kind remain compatible with a precise, documented, dated, geographically located, and technically constrained photographic event—the stop of Lincoln’s inaugural train at Clyde on 18 February 1861, between approximately 8:44 and 8:49 am?
A Test That Can Fail Before showing the plate, before comparing a beard, a collar, a hat, a shadow, or the line of a face, I must say what would disqualify the hypothesis. Four tests will govern the inquiry. The object. Are the plate, mat, case, materials, format, and construction compatible with a daguerreotype made or used in a rural village of the northeastern United States around February 1861? If any feature requires a clearly incompatible date or origin, the Clyde hypothesis fails. The provenance. Can the modern history of the object—its appearance in New York, its circulation through fairs and listings, and its acquisition—be reconstructed without contradiction? Modern provenance cannot prove Clyde in 1861. But a decisive inconsistency could exclude the plate. Place and light. Can the angle, shadows, background, technical conditions, and implied camera position remain compatible with an outdoor winter exposure near Clyde at the documented hour of the stop? If they plainly cannot, the hypothesis fails. The sitter’s general silhouette. Are the beard, collar, overcoat, hat, and other visible signs compatible with the narrow interval between Lincoln’s late 1860 appearance and the first settled presidential image of early 1861? If one feature plainly belongs elsewhere in time, the hypothesis fails. These tests do not make the case easy. They make it falsifiable. That is what an inquiry must demand of itself before it asks its reader to look at a face. In the next installment, the plate will be shown. We shall not begin by asking whom it represents. We shall begin by asking what it is.
La Fotografia è la più bella delle collezioni … Any question : fotografia
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