This Photo of Abraham Lincoln is Expected to Sell for $1 Million at Auction
An extremely rare photograph of Abraham Lincoln, described as “the closest you will get to ever seeing” the President, is estimated to fetch up to $1 million at auction this month.
The extraordinary photographic image of Lincoln is up for sale by University Archives in Wilton, Connecticut.
The auction house is offering a collection of more than 60 lots of items related to the 16th president of the United States — with this photograph of Lincoln headlining the sale.
The photograph comes with an estimate of $800,000 to $1 million. The current bid for the image sits at $250,000.
According to Antique Trader, this photograph stands out as particularly rare and significant because it was produced decades after Lincoln’s death.
George B. Ayers created the photograph between 1895 and 1900 using Alexander Hesler’s original negative of a portrait taken by Alexander Hesler in 1860 for Lincoln’s first presidential campaign.
The Ayers image is an interpositive, or a negative of a negative, in a gelatin silver print on a glass plate. The glass plate captures a degree of detail that gets lost in paper prints — and is housed in a custom-built case with a backlight.
‘The Closest You’ll Ever Get to Seeing Abraham Lincoln’
Grant Romer, Director of Photograph Conservation for the George Eastman House, or Eastman Museum, who restored the image, describes it as “the closest you will get to ever seeing Lincoln, short of putting your eyeballs on the man himself.”
Meanwhile, John Reznikoff, president and owner of University Archives, calls the image “perhaps the most vivid and lifelike photographic likeness of Lincoln ever produced.”
Antique Trader reports that glass plate interpositives by George B. Ayers rarely come to the market. Ayers had bought Alexander Hesler’s studio in Chicago in 1865 and later sold prints made from Hesler’s negatives.
Hesler used the wet-plate collodion process, where the glass photographic plate is coated with a nitrocellulose solution. This improved on early daguerreotypes by creating a sharper, more detailed image and allowing for unlimited copies of prints.
Ayers later recalled how he had purchased Hesler’s original Lincoln negatives in the mid-1860s, protecting them from the almost certain destruction they would have faced in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Unfortunately, in 1933, Hesler’s glass plates were shattered during shipping.
This particular interpositive may have been one of those affected, requiring a meticulous 18-month restoration, which was the focus of a 2009 lecture at the George Eastman House.
The photograph will be offered at “The Abraham Lincoln Collection” auction by University Archives slated for April 23, at 10 A.M (ET). Other items in the sale include a one-page letter signed by Lincoln in 1859 and addressed to a man he had defended in a murder trial, and a one-page autograph letter written in Hebrew in 1948 by the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
Image credits: All photos by University Archives.
