Look familiar? That Lincoln broach resting on her chest and the love story that goes with the painting are heart warming. Apparently, Mary and a painter named Francis Carpenter- who stayed at the White House for some time- secretly worked on this portrait so that she could surprise her husband with it. Unfortunately, the president was assassinated before she could present it to him.
It turns out that this story was untrue. An unknown painter who called himself Lew Bloom actually painted the following portrait of an unidentified woman:
When he heard that Mary had died, he painted over his work to make the woman look more like the president's widow and put Lincoln's face on a broach on her dress. He also reconstructed another story that convinced her descendants to pay a great amount of money for the painting.
We have been talking about construction and reconstruction for a while now in American Studies, and this story makes me wonder about a person's motive for reconstructing a story. In the case of our reconstruction projects (where we had to reconstruct the Reconstruction era after the Civil War), the motive was to create a better and more fair life for the freedmen with the hope of reducing their 100-year wait for voting rights. In the case of this Mary Todd Lincoln painting, Bloom's motive was to take advantage of a sad situation in order to be rich. So reconstruction can be bad and it can be good, but my question is that in the end, will the outcome be the same as if there hadn't been a reconstruction? Bloom was found out and that caused distress on Lincoln's descendants. How do we know our reconstruction of the Reconstruction era would create a different outcome?
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