Circa 1846 Daguerreotype – Alexander Joy Cartwright debate

[bmarlowe1]

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>> It is the most tortured rational conceivable to say that…

Real rock solid provenance would include reliable 19thC documentation attributable to AJC that describes and identifies the photo (such as a mention in his letter to Debost ). What we have instead is several early documented very odd “missed opportunities” where one would have expected that such a significant artifact would be mentioned or discussed (pp 30-31), followed by the rather sudden appearance of the photo in the mid-1930’s. There is nothing “tortured” in being suspicious of that.

I’ve received a number of emails from people who have had difficulty identifying or have misidentified youthful photos of grandparents, great uncles, etc. – this is not uncommon (there are several posts here that attest to that). The AJC that Bruce Jr. knew from life was an old man as seen in the old man photos in the newsletter. We don’t know what Bruce’s facial recognition skills were, but we do know how bad such skills can be.

One thing that would have been missing in the Carwright for HoF campaign was a nice team photo with AJC (the team photo in Spalding’s book did not include AJC, nor did the 1862 team salt print). Perhaps Bruce Jr. found the HPD somewhere and talked himself into believing it was what he needed (certainly collectors often do just that). Also bizarre – perhaps. I don’t pretend to know what happened here, but there is no narrative concerning the HPD that I have heard that easily connects the dots. This is a thick story for which we have only very thin conflicting slices. One needs to reflect on how little we actually know.