Curator calls Lincoln portrait a fraud

CHICAGO – A celebrated portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln that hung for years in the Illinois governor’s mansion in Springfield was an elaborate fraud apparently concocted to swindle President Abraham Lincoln’s descendants, according to the curator of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

The painting was famous almost as much for its back story – also a lie – as for the artistry itself, museum curator James Cornelius said Saturday.

“It was supposedly a gift Mary Lincoln planned to give to her husband, but then he was assassinated and she became a widow before she could present it to him,” Cornelius said.

The deception came to the fore during recent restoration work on the painting after Cornelius had it removed from the governor’s mansion, where renovations were being done.

Art restorer Barry Bauman noticed that the signature on the painting by supposed artist Francis Carpenter seemed to have been added later, Cornelius said.

Further investigation revealed that the original subject seemed not to have been Mary Lincoln. “It’s some anonymous woman,” Cornelius said.

The painting was sold to the Lincoln family in the late 1920s for between $2,000 and $3,000, according to Cornelius.

It stayed in the family’s possession until Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith gave it to the state historical library in 1976, Cornelius said.

Art restorers who worked on it then “probably should have figured out the deception,” but they didn’t, Cornelius said.

Cornelius plans to display the painting in the museum for a while after Bauman presents his findings on the fraud in April.

“It doesn’t have the back story we thought it had, but in a way it has a new back story that’s quite intriguing,” Cornelius said.