For Open Minds Only!

It has been years now since I stumbled upon the “Stubborn Flame.” Recovering from a heart attack, I had been killing time surfing on ebay for antique photographic images. One day I recognized a face on an old tintype offered by an image dealer and the saga began. After weeks of pondering, I finally gave in and purchased the image and the rest is the unknown and perhaps controversial history which unfolds here. 

 I came across this tintype of Ada Menken, 

the Victorian version of Madonna, and 

I was hooked.

What started as a chance recognition ended up growing into a 200+ image collection, all purchased from one image dealer, who hadn't the slightest idea about the identities of his images. Once I recognized one, another related image would surface in an adjacent auction, and gradually I began to detect some related themes and circles of famous people. Then the circles began to intersect. The first image was an actress, and most were elites, artists and writers and women suffragists. That was when I named this project the Stubborn Flame. You see I connected all these individuals with the burning seed of creativity, the universe of human genius, the one which at times is barely recognizable from the pit of insanity. The one which at times spawns criminal masterminds and their able nemesis and equal, the intrepid lawman. These too showed up in the collection. 

 Old dingy tintypes yes... but of Old West legends!

Hopefully facial recognition technology can be 

used to satisfy skeptics.  

My benefactor eventually auctioned tens of thousands of items, and probably over 5000 historic images over a years' time. I suppose in a collection that large, there were bound to be a few famous people. But these were not just famous people, they were the most important people to Western Culture in the Nineteenth Century. After a year amassing the Stubborn Flame, I finally began to understand what it was. The person who sold the individual images to me a few at a time could not help at all with any background or origin for any of them. He claimed to have gathered this staggering collection over the years, and offered no geographic affinity or provenance. 

A few images among his auctions the seller suspected were famous outlaws, but no one would pay his asking price. He claimed there were old tags attached to some of these images which gave him clues to their identity. But eventually I became convinced that the tags he had did not go with the images he was offering as six-figure historic outlaw tintypes. Meanwhile I was gathering truly historic and significant images from him. Some in my newly acquired collection fit his tags. And I had the eye for familiar faces, and their identities could be somewhat deduced and even proven in time. And if I was right, he had sold me many authentic, one-off tintypes of famous western outlaws and lawmen and other high-profile Americans.

 SEVERAL possible tintypes (numbered) of Jesse James. 

I know... what are the odds???

So I want to share this thrilling process with you. It was absolutely the most exciting thing I was ever a part of. Every day for about a year I scoured over the hundreds of auctions offered by this one person, looking for new listings, waiting to snag them by being the high bidder. Researching most of them before I even bid on them, I knew exactly who they were long before they showed up in my mailbox.

And eventually I discovered an intriguing story behind them. It is not a commonly known story. In fact, I think very few people know what I will reveal on this website. If you are interested in Mark Twain, Civil War spies, Pinkerton detectives, the French Impressionists, or the Old West, you will find this epic stumble of mine fascinating.

Towards the end of the purchases, which came to an abrupt end, I had identified not only the owner of this collection but one of the photographers... if I am right. And they were one and the same. There was only one person it could be. The geographic associations of the famous people in the tintypes gave me a roadmap of one very famous Victorian photographer and writer. And strangely, intriguingly, perhaps intentionally, a man almost totally ignored by literary scholars.

Only one man had traveled extensively throughout the South after the Civil War, as an itinerant photographer, operated a photographic studio in the Midwest, moved to New York and became Mark Twain's biographer, and traveled to France researching Joan of Arc. I believe this is, in part the photographic journal of Albert Bigelow Paine, a collection he amassed while writing some of the most important biographies of the cultural iconclasts of his era, and many made by himself. Many were no doubt loaned for publication purposes and never returned. Some were personal family photographs of the Clemens family, made before Paine was born, or had learned to use a camera.

Albert Bigelow Paine, henceforth named just A.B., was the most secretive, the most versatile, the most cunning, and perhaps the most scandalous character in American literature. Sure others did more sensational things, wrote more outrageous books, but none could equal A.B., who managed to (I believe) photograph the Most Wanted outlaws of the time (probably for law enforcement), build a thriving photograph supply in Kansas, then suddenly switch to writing biographies and immediately cast a spell on Mark Twain and his whole family, then parley his New York associations into coveted assignments putting the permanent spin on Lillian Gish, Thomas Nast and other Nineteenth Century icons, whose legacies sometimes required a bit of spit and polish for posterity. All while becoming the foremost children's writer of his day, and in spite of the fact that he had abandoned his wife and family and business in Kansas and remarried his second wife without the trouble of divorce.

A.B. Was the first PR man, the vanguard of spin doctors. And as spin doctor he first operated on himself. Like Twain, A.B. found a ready following in France, where he seems to have shadowed everything Mark Twain did, even, according to the French, besting him in his own rendition of Joan of Arc. Twain's Joan was a bust, Paine's a triumph. It was at this time that one or both of them made or collected a stunning and extremely personal photographic record of the French Impressionists and their families. They are here too. Monet, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, even Van Gogh. Even Monet's wives and children. Even beautiful Berthe Morisot- even her first lover, sculptor Aime Millet. Paine must have bummed that photo, made before he owned a camera. A.B. was the ingratiater extraordinaire.

Berthe and Aime

 

 Each photograph has been painstakingly researched, 

in an effort to make sure of the identities and weed out 

mere look-alikes.

We have almost no written record of any of Paine's adventures. Only his published manuscripts. We know he was in these places. We know he wrote those books... scores of them. Yet nobody ever wrote the biography of the biographer. A.B. avoided interviews, gave one-paragraph biographical sketches. Nobody ever unearthed his secrets or improprieties. Not until history had long shed her dust on his sizable legacy. Nobody saved or protected his photographs either. Otherwise I would not have some of them.

Or at least I think do. You be the judge.