< Aiello confirmed that all the Morphy images were from the original.>

Are you referring to all the Morphy images in the 2nd edition as the ones being "from the original"? Or just the particular image you asked HNOC about?

One reason for my asking is this:

<Lawson [(Whipple)] also included a large number of pictures and photographs in his original book. This new edition omits some pictures but contains some new images.>

From Aiello's <Editor's Introduction>, in which he explains the changes he made to the book, there's: <Lawson included myriad pictures throughout the text of his original manuscript. Some of those pictures have been retained, others have been omitted or replaced with new images. All have been moved to two distinct picture sections.>

This first picture section - which consists of several photos of Lawson, wife and friends - is all new (except for a head shot of Lawson that appeared on the original dust jacket), but these relate to Aiello's introduction and not the main text.

My response to the <HNOC> questioned whether the seller withheld their identity or the information may simply have been neglected.

<Miss Smith>'s reply: <It’s not that the identity was intentionally withheld or not deemed worth recording, it’s just that very often in the auction setting the name of the consigner isn’t made public as part of the documentation.>

And then in her next, she dropped a couple of bombshells....

<My apologies, I missed a page in the accession documentation regarding the auction – the daguerreotype was from the Leo Stashin Collection. The auction pages are attached here.

The 1976 edition does not include the photo.>

From one of the pages:

<Leo Stashin (1919-1973) was a photographer of note whose curiosity about the exquisite art form of early portrait photography fueled a passion for collecting daguerreian images. In the 1960s, he scoured flea markets and antique shops throughout the mid-Atlantic states in the hope of uncovering gems. He was not alone in his pursuits. His wife, a Ph. D. in microanatomy, with the heart of a detective, assisted in researching their finds. Both professionals in their own fields, as a team they were hobbyist sleuths.

[More biographical detail snipped]

The following 12 (?) lots have been in the family's possession since Stashin's death in 1973.>

The other page contains our familiar picture - confusingly numbered lot(?) #15 - a description of same and a potted biography of Morphy cribbed from Hartston's <The Kings of Chess>. The estimate is given as $2,200 -2,800.

I had asked <Miss Smith> to check and then re-check the 1976 edition for information about the picture, but she affirmed again that it wasn't there.

Aiello subsequently - via inter-library loan - got his hands on the first edition(which he presumably hadn't seen since 2010) and also confirmed its absence.

So where are we? I surmise this photo was completely unknown to Lawson (he died in 1980), and, all in likelihood, was never published as a portrait of Morphy in any chess book or periodical before 2010, when it turned up in a Google image search by some eager beaver working for UL Press.

This “find” led him, however, to discover and identify other daguerreotypes, including plates of Presidents John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce. [...]>

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/10/29/...

PPS- If you're skeptical about fig 3 being Morphy, then do you give even an iota of credence to fig 4? .>

<C. M. — The portrait of Morphy in Mr Bohn's volume is a very good one, and is, if we are not mistaken, engraved from the striking photograph taken for THE FIELD by Mr H. Watkins, of Regent-street.>

Bohn's volume refers to Loewenthal's <Morphy's Games of Chess>, published at the beginning of 1860 (not to be confused with the American version, published by Appleton, in the same month).

Here is the engraving, itself, undoubtedly, the basis for <cg>'s own Morphy image:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James...

(J. Stephenson on the engraving)

The engraving itself just cites "From a Photograph", so the Field info is very helpful.

E.g. Chess Dryad got the engraver right, but the photographer wrong (at least according to <The Field>):

http://www.chessdryad.com/articles/...

As an aside, I often found myself following in the footsteps of batgirl, or Gillam while doing research. Seems to be the case here as well, as batgirl collects quite a few of Morphy photographs / illustrations here:

https://www.chess.com/article/view/...

Although, it does seem rather curious that Stephenson's Morphy engraving is missing from her post.

Let's also note how skinty her source credits are once we get to the gilded framed photo mentioned previously in this thread.

I think we can discount the notion that it was based on a picture by Brady; it was surely an entirely London affair. The engraving is missing from the Appleton edition.

<When Theodore Kupferman went to Washington in 1966 as the representative of Manhattan's 17th District, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate and had decorated the halls of Congress with portraits of their heroes.

Rep. Kupferman, a Republican, decided that Congress should be a little more bipartisan in its decor, and began to pass out pictures of a couple of GOP standard-bearers: Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, whose 158th birthday we commemorate tomorrow.

The likeness of Honest Abe that Kupferman distributed resembled the familiar, bearded, craggy-faced Lincoln that appears on $5 bills and pennies. The portraits were well received, even by Democrats, says Kupferman because: "Nobody objects to Lincoln."

Now, partly because of his own sleuthing Kupferman has another picture of the 16th President that a lot of people - Democrats, Republicans, Lincoln-lovers and Lincoln-haters alike - object to.

This new likeness of the Great Emancipator was discovered by one of the congressman's constituents, Leo Stashin, a freelance magazine photographer.

If you were to get a $5 bill or a penny with Stashin's Lincoln on it, you would immediately think it counterfeit. In fact, you might not even think that the picture was of Lincoln.

That was Kupferman's reaction. "It couldn't be Lincoln," he said. "It couldn't be Lincoln because I didn't want it to be Lincoln. My image of him was of Lincoln the father figure."

Far from looking fatherly, Stashin's 120-year-old daguerreotype, discovered in a Greenwich Village antique shop, looks more like a stern uncle.

"But," says Stashin, who paid $28 for the picture a year ago, "as I examined it, I wondered whether this could be the real Lincoln."

It took Stashin six months of intensive research in chemistry, history and anatomy to convince himself that the picture was indeed of Lincoln; it took him an hour to convince Kupferman.

Stashin had hoped that the congressman would be able to prevail upon the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use their photoanalysis facilities to examine the picture.

Kupferman, a Lincoln buff himself, was so intrigued he went one better: he suggested that the picture be electronically analyzed by the same process used to examine photographs from space.

He made inquiries in Washington and met Col. Charles J. SuSong, Jr., of Itek Corp.'s data analysis center in Alexandria, Va.

Col. SuSong has run a number of tests and, because he has "found many things that are similar" in this portrait and other known portraits of Lincoln, is continuing his work.

Although he is cautious about predicting any positive identification of the picture, SuSong says, "I have a kind of feeling it's there."

Why, then, the obvious differences between this picture and the other 100 or so known photographs of Lincoln?

To begin with, Lincoln sat for the portrait in 1849, at that time when political problems caused him, according to William H. Herndon, his law partner, to be "aggrieved, irritated and depressed."

Also, the portrait is the only photograph taken of Lincoln from a high camera angle, according to Mr. Stashin, and that would tend to give a different perspective to the subject's features.

https://www.lincolncollection.org/c...

https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydete...

https://www.alamy.com/mr-paul-morph...

Boden's praise for the picture, I take to mean that he thought it a very good likeness.>

Only now do I notice that the Watkins image is also used in both editions (the American <Appleton> and the British <William Lay>) of Edge's book on Morphy, which appeared in print about June and September 1859, respectively.

From the shared preface (with some differences):

<The cuts with which this work is embellished have been engraved by the well-known Brothers Dalziel. The portrait of Morphy, copied from a photograph taken shortly after his arrival in London last year, is an excellent likeness.>

https://collections.mfa.org/objects...

Not quite. I would propose four tests...

i) Internal evidence - the image itself.

ii) External evidence - the object itself.

iii) Provenance.

<C. M. — The portrait of Morphy in Mr Bohn's volume is a very good one, and is, if we are not mistaken, engraved from the striking photograph taken for THE FIELD by Mr H. Watkins, of Regent-street.>> Paul Morphy (kibitz #7387)

Back then, I didn't spend too much time on the identity of this Watkins, but from the woodcut portrait accompanying the biography of Morphy that appeared in the <Field> of August 21st 1858, p.153, I now find that he is <Mr. Herbert Watkins, of 215, Regent-Street>.

<Watkins opened his Regent Street studio in 1856, and produced a series of photographs of distinguished contemporaries, which he published with printed biographies under the title of National Gallery of Photographic Portraits. He claimed in his advertisements that his photographs were 'as remarkable for their agreeable fidelity to nature as for their brilliancy of production and their economy of cost'.>

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/...

Morphy was the player longest ahead of others. Like Bob Beamon in long jump. My understanding of him is he studied and understood openings more than others and he was the scientist type like Botvinnik, Aljechin, Kasparov.>

<thebully99: Morphy may have been the most naturally talented player of all time. But right now, I am not sure that he would have outmatched Steinitz in their respective primes or even Steinitz in the late 1880s. Natural geniuses aren't always better than leading theoreticians with incredible fighting spirits.>

I've come rather late to this discussion, having had my interest piqued by currently reading Frances Parkinson Keyes' novel "The Chess Players".

To the comments quoted above I'd add the assessment given by Hooper and Whyld in the Oxford Companion To Chess. Baldly summarised, this said that Morphy lacked any capacity for sustained hard work. He had a truly astounding ability to retain and recall knowledge of all kinds, but that can take one only so far, as I personally have found. It's not enough to possess talent, you need the strength of character to employ that talent to the maximum. That, I believe, was the main flaw in Morphy. (Inherited wealth and the consequent underdeveloped instinct for struggle wouldn't have helped either. Nor would the Creole culture in which he grew up, which - like Morphy himself - didn't regard chess playing as a proper occupation.)

paul morphy was decalred world champion, so was adolf anderssen who won the strongest ever, for that time, tournament... you dont have to be unofficial world champion not to be the world champion, same goes for zukertort....