Portraits
In 2009 a daguerreotype portrait of Gage (see head of article) was identified—the first likeness of him identified other than a life mask taken around 1850. It shows "a disfigured yet still-handsome" Gage with one eye closed and scars clearly visible, "well dressed and confident, even proud" and holding his iron, on which portions of the inscription (recited above) can be made out. (For decades the daguerreotype's owners had imagined that it showed an injured whaler with his harpoon.) Authenticity was confirmed in several ways, including photo-overlaying the inscription visible in the portrait against that on the actual tamping iron in Harvard's Warren Anatomical Museum; and similarly, matching the injuries seen in the portrait against those preserved in the life mask.
Macmillan cites the daguerreotype as consistent with the social recovery hypothesis already described. To better understand the question, he and collaborators are actively seeking additional evidence on Gage's life and behavior, and describe certain kinds of historical material for which they hope readers will remain alert, such as letters or diaries by physicians whom their research indicates Gage may have met, or by persons in certain places Gage seems to have been.
In 2010 a second portrait of Gage (above) was identified. This new image, copies of which are in the possession of at least two different branches of the Gage family, depicts the same subject as the daguerreotype identified in 2009, according to Gage researchers consulted by the Smithsonian Institution.
Read more about this topic: Phineas Gage
Famous quotes containing the word portraits:
“... while I may paint in the tints or outlines of rocks and beaches, dawns and harbor, fleet and wharf, I never draw portraits of my neighbors or of my friends.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)