Showing posts with label Franklin Knight Lane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Franklin Knight Lane. Show all posts

Monday, January 18, 2010

The cabinet secretary's chin


A Wikipedia administrator who goes by the username Wehwalt has contributed a lot of featured articles about historic politics.  He's one of the reasons Wikipedia's biographies of Neville Chamberlain and Nikita Krushchev are as good as they are.  The portrait at right is lead illustration at another of Wehwalt's featured articles. Franklin Knight Lane was United States Secretary of the Interior during Woodrow Wilson's presidency.

Wehwalt and I were discussing a possible restoration on an image from one of his articles.  Something unexpected turned up last night when I saw the full resolution version of Lane's portrait.  This doesn't happen every day: it looks like a crude job of retouching tried to hide a double chin.


Notice how the dark marks begin just below his actual chin line although it's obvious that the actual skin in that area and below the side of his jaw is not in shadow.

So here's an invitation: you help me decide.  Should I restore Mr. Secretary Lane's original double chin or should I complete the retouching properly?  Normally I don't try to make encyclopedic subjects more handsome than they actually are, but this alteration looks historic.

My inclination is to reconstruct the original chin (both of them).  Yet I'm really curious what you think.

Either way, here's hoping you chuckle as much as my friends did.  There's nothing like a little bit of vanity even if it's 97 years old.