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The oldest recognized portrait of Lincoln dates to 1848, but in this web site a medical doctor examines a portrait of a man from 1840 who looks like Lincoln. Based on his research, the doctor claims that it is, in fact, the earliest portrait of Lincoln.
In 1987, a photographic print of an exceptionally high quality daguerreotype of a robust, confident-looking, and smartly dressed young man was brought to my office in Paris on, interestingly, Lincoln's birthday, February 12 (Figure 1a). The owner of the daguerreotype, which had been purchased from a gallery in New York City in 1977, was Mr. Albert Kaplan, an American then residing in Paris. Mr. Kaplan was convinced, after years of personal research, that the young man pictured in the daguerreotype was Abraham Lincoln. He had sought me out to subject his conviction to the science of my medical specialty.
Agreed… too many features that wouldn't change are different… look at the ears.. they are not the same…the shape of the nose and the brow… all totally different… even making a facial expressions wouldn't change these as much as they are changed…The picture is someone else...
If I just look at the two side-by-side, I think they're different as well. But the good doctor seems to think that they're on in the same based on his analysis of the body (“I conclude that the Abraham Lincoln of the early 1840s is, without the possibility of error, the very man of the Kaplan daguerreotype.”) An interesting point that he makes is how the old and frail Lincoln that we picture in our minds today was not the same as the more youthful Lincoln. Didn't he grow up in some isolation in the forests of Indiana/Illinois, splitting wood for his family? So he must have been strong as a young man.
