Abraham Lincoln, 1865

What the photograph shows

Gardner posed Lincoln for a head-and-shoulders portrait, facing the camera with a slight, close-mouthed smile, a full beard without a mustache, a dark frock coat and a bow tie, against a plain light backdrop. The Library of Congress catalogs the sitting as Sunday, February 5, 1865, at Gardner's Gallery in Washington, D.C. — correcting an older belief that this particular exposure was made on April 10, 1865, days before Lincoln was assassinated. That older, mistaken date is likely why the print still carries the title it does: traditionally called the last photograph of Lincoln taken from life.

This copy print is not a contact print from Gardner's original negative. The Library dates it to sometime between 1885 and 1911, decades after the sitting, and notes that it was reproduced in Frederick Hill Meserve's 1911 book The Photographs of Abraham Lincoln. It is a gelatin silver print, softer and more grained than a first-generation print would be — because it is a photograph of a photograph, made after the negative it depended on no longer existed.

What happened to the negative — and to this print

According to the Library of Congress, the original glass negative cracked and was discarded back in 1865, the same year Gardner made the exposure — an unusually short life for a negative whose image went on to be reprinted for the next half-century regardless. The original print struck from that negative survives at the National Portrait Gallery. This particular print is a later copy, made sometime between 1885 and 1911, and it carries the same crack: a record of damage to the negative itself, reproduced in every copy struck from it afterward, this one included.

On the scan, the crack runs as a pale line across the top of the frame, through Lincoln's hair from edge to edge — the mark this photograph is best known for. It is a different kind of damage from a paper crease, which our guide to fixing a creased photo covers separately: a crease folds and cracks the emulsion of a single print, while this line was copied over and over because it sat on whatever the later prints were struck from. Our guide to restoring old negatives covers this kind of support damage in more depth, including what a scan can and cannot recover from it.

What was repaired

Restoration removed the crack cleanly and cropped away the print's white border and double-ruled mounting line — the tool returns only the photograph, not the paper it sits on. Lincoln's pose, his half-smile, the faint asymmetry between his eyes, the bow tie and coat are all as Gardner's sitting and this copy print recorded them; nothing there was reshaped. The photograph comes back in color. The color is inferred by the model: the photograph recorded light and shadow, not hue.

The result is also noticeably crisper than the soft copy print it was made from — individual hairs, skin texture, the weave of the coat — and on a face as photographed as Lincoln's, part of that sharpness is drawn from everything else the model has seen of it, not from this print alone.

The crack itself is part of this object's history, and the Library's own catalog record says so plainly. Removing it here is meant to show the photograph closer to how Gardner made it, not to argue the crack should never have been recorded — the original print, untouched by anything we did, remains exactly as it is at the Library of Congress and the National Portrait Gallery, and anyone who would rather see the crack left in has a reasonable point.