A Series of "Coincidences"?

This is a website that believes in miracles. If you read and explore it, you will quickly see why. Over a year ago I began to acquire an extraordinary antique image collection... from an Internet auction, one at a time, which should wind up as a collection in the Smithsonian some day.

In the meantime, I am trying to research the images and figure out what I have. I have read scores of books... and sometimes they have explained what I have, as illustrated in this blog. Seemingly ordinary things and events described in biographies about the subjects have become historical proof of the images themselves. With no provenance, these “coincidences” have become the only evidence I have that this whole incredible project is what I think it is. Many images are explained in blog articles below... but for now here is the big picture of what I think you are looking at.

 

I BELIEVE, these images were once resting in the archives of Mark Twain, and later his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, who eventually had custody of all things Twain. Sam Clemens was a naturally curious man, and had many varied interests, and especially in human nature and current events, and no less Paine, his personal biographer and confidant. He opened doors for Paine, who wrote some very important biographies of the most important creative personalities of their time. I think, I THINK, that these two, separately and then collectively amassed a vast photo archive which eventually fell into “temporary” storage upon their deaths and sadly, into irrelevance and obscurity.

Authors are often sought out and courted to write important and not-so important biographies of the important and the self-important. They often consider these projects, and during the earliest stages of developing these biographies, many unrealistic ideas and goals are negotiated... and often the authors themselves start out with grandiose schemes... and probably the frills most often dreamed of- and just as often the most often dashed are the ideas, pipe dreams, of profuse illustrations in the proposed book. Everybody loves pictures.... except publishers, who hate paying for them, and thin them out mercilessly. Thus every manuscript for that matter, whether or not it ever gets published, is often accompanied with scores of pictures for illustration that will never be used; Pictures that have been promised by the authors to be returned to their sentimental owners... some day.

And that often never happens... for many reasons. Mostly because books take a long time to produce, and authors hold on to the loaned pictures hoping the publishers will change their minds, realize the value of the illustrations, and ask for them. By the time all hope for using the images has been dashed, the authors are working on new books, the image owners have gotten old and even died, and the images are forgotten about and sit waiting to be returned- indefinitely. They cannot be thrown away... or sold... and they sit in dark corners until the authors get old or die, and then are sold off at some estate sale, or hailed off, along with a mountain of unwanted books and papers and artifacts that are common in an author's personal archives. I am sure it is a story often repeated.

 Deeply personal and rare tintypes of famous families... in this case neighbors of the Clemens... I thought these (1 & 2) were of Mary Cassatt's mother... and was not surprised by the name of the book  in her lap when enlarged: The Practical Painter.

Now imagine what kinds of things MIGHT have been lurking in the neglected corners of the likes of Mark Twain or Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer. Both men were world travelers, who were the first to be asked to consider the most exciting and prestigious projects in the country. And for every project they completed, scores went unfinished, saved for a “rainy day.” Both men knew the “Who's Who” of upper society, and the Counts and no counts... and either of them could easily have stashed the stunningly important image collection seen here.

Here is the wonderful part, for most of the people pictured in this Victorian image collection, there is a direct link or at least a possible link, to one or both of these men. I believe that the best intentions they had about returning this mountain of borrowed images evolved over decades into a truckload of dusty boxes which were disposed of, and thankfully, somebody looked at them and saw their value... probably a hundred years later. That is where I come in.

A lifelong history lover, I am an instinctive detective, and an artist with a brain for recognizing likenesses. It has been an exciting year, and after many hundreds of hours of research, this blog is finally starting to make sense. These are important images, I believe from personal collections of many famous people, once entrusted to two of the most important writers of the Nineteenth Century. But they had never been published. Not then, not until now, and right here.

You are looking into the secrets and riddles of our history, some deliberately, some by happenstance, and all once intended to illustrate American and some European biographies never written, or at least never published. Lawmen, outlaws, entertainers, politicians, writers, artists, and many more. There are many photographs, merely collected, for the visual delight they inspired. AND, I BELIEVE, some of them may have been the work of Albert Paine who was also a photographer.

Dive in!