the Stubborn Flame: tintypes

Showing posts with label tintypes. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 25, 2021

THE DIGITAL TRAIL OF A "HISTORYTECTIVE" : An Update On This Parallel Universe...

So YEARS have rolled by as I have read and studied and struggled to understand what has become a canyon of digital dopplegangers. So far I have failed to impress any publishers or historians for that matter, with these incredible antique finds, but I have given myself a new title: The "Historytective." I have also learned how to digitally test my hunches, to eliminate as best as I can any mere dopplegangers, and isolate whatever tintypes in my collection may be significant.

Via Photoshop, I can compare my images with known photographs of my subjects, using what I call "Quintangulation," or Q-5, where I can fairly exactly superimpose 5 to 10 unchangable features of one face over another, to see if they share the same proportions. It is a significant step up from the old methods used by law enforcement for a century, and I think as reliable as computer facial recognition. If my subjects line up with these five or more points, then I call them a match and an historically important discovery.

"RCHIC" stands for the Russell Cushman Historical Image Collection."

The blue-green marks are the digital quintangulation marks, lifted off of one face and then placed down on the face of the famous person from history. I line up the eyes, then the rest must fit... or the whole thing is scrapped. Here are some to consider... new, "fresh," never before published images of some of the most famous Americans of the Victorian era.

The features of the human face which are decided by skull structure change very little, such as the distance between the irises of the eyes and from them to the eyebrows, or especially the distance between the nostrils and those irises, or the placement of the cheek bones in relation to these six "points"... and if the subject is fairly young, the bottom of the chin is also related to those other points. A close match of all of these proportions is highly unlikely, and certainly qualifies as a doppleganger. If the ears are the same shape... we have a winner. All of these mathematical relationships are only explored if the face in question is already a match as far as the correct time period, vintage clothing, and captured by the appropriate photographic technology. As best as can be deduced from black and white photography, hair and eye color are studied... although they can be misleading.

So far I have identified several hundred tintype images, many of which pass my Q-5 test. And amoung them are these... "Triple Headers," which, when multiplied into the odds against finding such a doppleganger, defy the greatest skeptic. To find an image which has three persons who look very much like three famous persons right out of history... the proper ages and body type, who happened to have had some relation to one another, and each of which can be verified through my "quintangulation," process, is exciting and I believe quite important to American History.

To have found a score of these rare photographic records of our past, is beyond even my own belief. But here some of them are. If you click on the images, they will come up larger.

Saturday, March 16, 2019

My Gift of FINDING

Some of you may wonder, if this guy finds these rare photos all the time, why doesn't everybody do it? This guy just goes to Ebay, scrolls down, and buys scores of rare unidentified antique tintypes... every day it seems. How hard could it be?

Well, it's not... if you know how. And if you have a CLUE. I have purchased so many I am sick of it... There are probably more to come, so if you have a good mind and have already studied history to some degree... you might have some success.

Granted I am long in the tooth, and have been reading and staring at the faces of history as a pastime most of those years, and have been scrolling on Ebay about as long as it has been around...and I did not find most of these until the past few years, when a single seller began to divest himself of his lifelong collection. But there will always be another guy like that out there...

So to clue you in, get you jump-started so to speak... here is how it has been working, famously, for me.

First of all, I had to discover a decent honey hole. A dealer who is selling semi-significant historic photographs. If you RECOGNIZE ANYONE, remember that if the seller has one, he may have more... even hundreds. Of course the ideal honey hole is one where somebody is selling a bunch of items and has no clue themselves what they have... and yes, that happens. Old museums, libraries, publishing houses, IGNORANT RELATIVES get rid of unwanted archives all the time.

So for instance, I recognized some disheveled cowboys whose faces seemed familiar. That means they were probably criminals, since I have always been fascinated with the Old West and the good guys and bad guys. One fellow looked particularly significant... and after the process of elimination, I narrowed his neighborhood to TOMBSTONE. Soon I had him tagged as Ike Clanton. Identifying him helped me identify Tom McClaury, the hunky thug sitting next to him. It helped a lot that soon another tintype came right after of Curly Bill Brocius. It also did not hurt my confidence in my finds that I had already purchased a number of tintypes of Old West characters from the same seller.

But this is just an example of how this all worked... so follow me on this... So now I am alerted, there may be more... well the way that I grew in confidence of my identifications was the incredible comparisons available on GOOGLE search. I gather those images for scrutiny and file them for future reference...

BUT HERE IS WHAT IS IMPORTANT- it's not what I put in my files for reference that are so important. It's all the THOUSANDS of images I see while hunting the Internet. While I am searching Curly Bill, the Internet is showing me every person ever recorded that had ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIM. What I have learned is that I have to pay attention to those faces...

Images are going to often be sold in related batches. If it's a family album... and you have found Curly Bill, you may next be seeing (but not recognizing) images of his girl friend, or his brother, or his boss for sale... and if those faces have ever been recorded... as you seek verification about Bill on GOOGLE search, you are surfing right over them as you look for him. I have learned to look for clues and not to trust the first page of a search... I go three and four deep. Of course GOOGLE has one long page... so go to the bottom!

About this same time I was reading a book by Albert Bigelow Paine... about Lillian Gish, a famous actress during the late 1800's/ early 1900's. Actually Paine is a key to all of these, and I will confess to having an advantage knowing that. No sooner had I begun to read about Gish, "my seller" began to list images of her. And not just Lillian Gish, but several very important early silent screen actresses. Because I had been brushing up on them, it did not take long to identify y them.

The numbered ones are my finds.

Don't worry, if you have a memory, it will tell you.. "I think I just saw that face..."

For instance, as I was wrapping up the Tombstone and early movie star finds, still searching the Ebay offerings for historic images I might have overlooked, and researching possible related faces on the Internet, and I had constantly surfed past various images of Teddy Roosevelt. Uncannily, he was linked to both previous groups. The movie stars were closely associated with Broadway, ran in prominent New York circles, as did the Roosevelts. Teddy may have also been the most famous Easterner who "went West," forever associating himself with cowboys and the Wild West. And so many times as I surfed on GOOGLE, I had imprinted on my sub-conscious his pretty little face as a youth. (above) It looks like a cute little kid, but nothing like Teddy Roosevelt.

A rare tintype of the Roosevelt kids... Teddy in the middle about 14 years old... surrounded by his sisters Bamie (left) and Corrine (right). Not sure about the other young man... might be brother Elliott. The girl on far left is Anna Hall, Elliott's future wife.

Then when a tintype appeared with a young fellow who looked like that elfin Roosevelt visage, I was prepared to see its possibilities. I checked it out. Now the seller was unknowingly breaking into his Roosevelts. Big time. This was the largest related batch he ever sold.

Teddy Roosevelt's family- a baby pic of him (bottom) and his brother's beautiful wife, Anna Rebecca Hall Roosevelt (center). That's his brother Elliott with the handlebar mustache... and their son Gracie Hall Roosevelt (bottom right).

I had to do a TON of research to stay on top of these. There was a whole batch related to Teddy, and a whole batch related to his cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even a batch of FDR's Delano relatives. It kept me busy for weeks. All from one squirrely picture of Teddy Roosevelt. That I would never have recognized without that search for the McClaurys and Clantons.

Members of the Roosevelt family, including young FDR in center with dog, and tintypes of his future wife, Eleanor (lower right).

Delanos, including FDR's mother, top right.

So about the time I was exhausted with Roosevelts, but before they were completely depleted, the seller broke into the next group of unnamed "famous" persons. One of the tintypes was of a very funny looking young woman... dressed so unbecomingly that I told myself, I'm NOT buying that one! But then while researching the Roosevelts, and by now I had learned after studying their genealogy ( absolutely necessary to ID all the images) that the Delano side were Cushman descendants... thus distantly related to me. I also found that FDR was a distant cousin of Laura Ingalls Wilder. And THAT was why the Internet kept throwing Wilder images up during my search for Roosevelts. BINGO- the goofy girl turned out to be Laura's little sister.

Photos of the Ingalls and Wilder families, made famous by Little House on the Prairie.

And suddenly there were Wilders popping up on this same auction site. That too was exhausting because Charles Ingalls had a bunch of brothers and sisters... and they all had a lot of children... making identification very tedious, since family resemblance made it necessary to note all birth dates... and who even lived to be old enough to be in the picture. I was able to ID most of them... eventually amassing ( I believe) the largest Wilder photo collection outside of a museum. One of the last was a more modern photo of Rose Wilder (1930's), Laura's daughter, who was also a writer and no doubt inherited the Wilder scrapbook...

AND THEN... because I had been alerted, via my research that Rose Wilder had written a biography of Herbert Hoover... I was forewarned and ready when tintypes showed up next of Hoover and his siblings.

I hope by now you see how it works... it feeds itself. The research, if you are into a vein of related images, will clue you in, prepare you to find them. And the images and history you absorb just leads you to the next find...

Some folks would try to attribute all this to the power of suggestion. Neither of us can prove the other wrong.

The first tintype I found was after reading several books about Adah Isaacs Menken. Those books led me to HUNDREDS of finds, by just showing me famous people that most people are not thinking about. So start by just reading a lot about your favorite historical character, (within the history of photography!) and this system can work for you!

So, does anybody know the phone number of the Smithsonian?

Friday, December 7, 2018

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!

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

UNRESOLVED

Sadly for me, a proud Texan, there were very few images in this project representing Texans. But towards the end of the acquisition I finally recognized a famous Texan, famous for being an Oklahoman!

Finally! A Texan! Temple Houston was an Oklahoma

lawyer, gunslinger, and sometime politician. He was

Sam Houston's youngest and most genetically similar

son... even though he never really knew his father.

Due to difficulty, I waited as long as possible before unveiling this portion of the Russell Cushman Historical Image Collection. This was a challenging puzzle, with four brothers who shared a strong family resemblance.

First the flamboyant and idiosyncratic Temple Houston, fourth son of Sam Houston, showed up on a CDV in one of the auctions where I had been snagging historical images for almost a year. As usual, the seller could not provide identification or provenance. Still, I knew it was him, and eventually found several more of his brothers...

There are very few images of the Houston children, which in itself is something of a mystery. Their father was an extroverted politician of great importance in American history, and certainly was painted, sculpted and photographed to the saturation level. But it is as if the children and Mrs. Houston were sequestered all of their lives, with scant and dimly lit peeks of them made available through limited family channels. Now my photographs prove that there were some... but perhaps they were loaned out for publishing purposes and never returned. Until NOW!

Considering the context of the rest of the collection, I believe that if I keep digging, will find somewhere that Albert Bigelow Paine, one of America's leading biographers, and the central culprit in this whole blog, at one time considered doing a biography of either Sam Houston or Temple Houston. And as I have displayed here, if my theories are correct, he was something of an image hoarder.

#1, Andrew Jackson Houston, named after Sam Houston's

close friend and commander and President of the United States.

Andrew was the second oldest, but was not old enough to

serve in the Confederacy, but served later in the National Guard.

Just some of the photos, nicely arranged, which guided

my identifications of three of the Houston boys, numbered

1 - 4. Ironically, the larger portion of them was of Andrew,

a man my father knew well and interviewed for his book.

First Temple and then several tintypes emerged with boys that looked very Houstonesque. They looked very much akin, but it would take me a long time to make this final graphic, organizing them, and hopefully correctly identifying them, using every photograph I could find for comparison. I never did see a photograph of Sam Jr., who was the oldest and less likely to have been photographed as a child, since he was born before photography had even come to frontier Texas.

But certainly after the Civil War, photography had come of age, and was available to the upper middle class in the larger population centers. The problem was the younger children were usually kept at home, which was probably Independence, Texas for most of them, and rarely seen in the political circles where Sam spent most of his time. The CDV (#4) of Temple in a suit was probably made when he served as a page in Washington D.C. when he was 15 or 16. By then he had already driven cattle all the way to the Dakotas, worked as a night clerk on a riverboat on the Mississippi, learned the "ways of the world," and then negotiated an appointment as a Washington page by a U.S. Senator.

#2, Andrew Jackson Houston in his late twenties. This one

well illustrates the Houston ferocity. Andrew was not as

handsome as the others, but was actually appointed to

the U. S. Senate from Texas, right before he died.

I will admit that the photos, numbering 1-4, are not the most flattering, but because they were grouped relatively close in an Internet auction march of thousands, I felt then and still feel strongly that they were related. And they certainly do look like Houstons. There is that intense scowl... with powerful lips, but basic good looks that ties them together. The toughest thing was to tell them apart, with no clues. The ears were the only way to differentiate one from another.

#3, Little William and Andrew Jackson Houston,

about 6 & 10, around the end of the Civil War-

perhaps dressed for their father's untimely funeral.

Here are some of the most acknowledged sons of Texas, all of which grew up in public shame after their father refused to lead Texas in Secession and joining the Confederacy, and was forced out of the Governor's office. They had to find their own way while time would eventually prove the Houstons were on the right side of history. All of them would have made Sam proud at one time or another, but some of them, especially Temple, would have frustrated the hell out of him. Sam Houston died during the Civil War, leaving the children to be raised without him. His devoted wife passed away soon after, and Temple and William were raised by their sister. The military and political legacy of his father, combined with the frustrations of defeat during the Civil War and the ostracism of his family because of his father's stance forged Temple Houston into a fierce young man with something to prove. And he soon chose someplace else to do it.

Temple Houston's life story included a law degree, political appointments, and a scandalous legal career which included shooting his pistols during a trial in his adopted state, Oklahoma. It is too much to cover here, but he would have been an intriguing western character to inspire a popular biography, but if anything, even Albert Bigelow Paine, the original spin doctor, might have hesitated.

There were at least two biographies written about him in the late Twentieth Century, the better one by Glenn Shirley; Temple Houston- Lawyer With A Gun.

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Mark Twain's Girls

Perhaps the most precious grouping in this extraordinary collection of Victorian images is this one... of the Clemens girls. To have stumbled upon these treasures has been a great thrill and privilege, and in the process has required that I research so much about them that I have begun to feel like a member of the family.

So let me introduce you.

My tintype of the two is the one in the middle, and enlarged for comparison.

Susy was the second born to the Clemens, after her brother Langdon, who died in infancy. She too was fragile, but her beauty and wisdom made her a favorite of Sam Clemens, who perceived that she had similar creative gifts to his. Clara was the high strung child, somewhat rebellious, who struggled for attention as the middle child. Susy would die as a young woman and never married, and Clara would fall in love with a young musician while studying music in Europe, and would eventually marry him.

The oldest and youngest Clemens girls.

Susy's sweetness is as obvious as Jean's robustness. Susy was the perfect big sister, a kind of little mother who ably led the other two. Tomboyish and hot- tempered, Jean developed epilepsy and spent a great deal of time in treatment at special facilities far from home.

I could not decide which of the Clemens daughters this was.

One day I say Jean, the next day Clara. If it is Jean,

it is the prettiest picture of her ever.

Strictly chaperoned, Clara met Ossip, a Russian piano student,

in music class while living in Europe. I think they were quite

fond of each other early on, but Sam was so busy with his

research and business problems that Olivia spared him the drama.

Clara tended to add and slough off weight all through her life. She was very thin as a child but plumped up as a pre-teen.. then growth spurts thinned her down until her metabolism slowed down and like her mother, she put on weight again as a young adult. Below she is in super-model form as she poses with her beloved music teacher (and matchmaker!) the celebrated Leschetiskzy.

Clara was a gifted singer and musician, and made it

her life's passion. But when you marry a world famous pianist,

your own music goals take the back seat.

Clara and Ossip pose, in winter garb, with

Ossip's sister, I think. Here Clara has gained a few

pounds, but wears them well. This photo was made long

before they were married, which was almost in middle age,

at the end of Twain's life.

I have to say, it was the appearance of these two Europeans, Grabrilowitch and Leschetiskzy, each with unique faces, pupil and teacher, which convinced me without any doubt about the identities of the young women in these tintypes. Nice looking people are harder to sift, but with these two men there were just too many coincidences necessary for these people to be any body else.

This was a tough one... (the oval in the middle) I thought this

was Olivia for along time. The similarity between Olivia and

her daughters was truly vexing. But the dress is more turn

of the Century...

Susy was a young adult on her own for the last chapter in her life, attending school while the Clemenses toured Europe. She became sick and died while they were away. Perhaps there was more to it, but the Clemens were very private and protective of the Twain image. Hers was the first death in a string of losses which left Mark Twain devastated.

Not long after, Olivia passed away from heart disease, and then just as Jean took the reins as woman of the house, she drowned in the bath tub one Christmas Eve, supposedly from an untimely epileptic seizure.

Clara was happily married to Ossip, and they spent a lot of time in Russia. They had one daughter, whose life would be more tragic than any of them. I have often wondered how these precious images got away, and were lost to history, and fear they were in her possession when she died of a drug overdose in California. There is a very strong presence of Clara, her mother, in the tintypes... But then she lived the longest, so that would make since. And this collection includes a great deal that would have been in the care of A.B. Paine... until his death.... and then... who knows

We will probably never know.

Monday, October 15, 2018

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.

the Stubborn Flame

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