Kiriakou's Abraham Lincoln collection
=====================================

John Kiriakou is a private collector of Abraham Lincoln material, a pursuit he describes as dating to childhood and grounded in the view that Lincoln was "the greatest president in American history" and "the kind of person that we should want to be like." He buys at major auction houses and treats documented provenance as the governing rule of the field.

The collection

Kiriakou's holdings, as he describes them, include an 11½-inch strip of wallpaper from the room at the Petersen guest house where Lincoln died; a swatch of the black dress Mary Todd Lincoln wore to her husband's funeral; a piece of the wood from the gallows on which the Lincoln conspirators were hanged; a ballot from Ohio in the 1860 election bearing Lincoln's name; and a framed fragment of the blood-soaked pillowcase on which Lincoln died. He keeps the pieces framed and hung rather than in a dedicated room.

Provenance

Provenance, the documented chain by which an object passed from Lincoln himself to its present owner, is the discipline Kiriakou treats as definitional: "you have to be able to document from Lincoln himself how it got to you." He offers the pillowcase fragment as the model. Mr Petersen, who owned the house in which Lincoln died, cut the pillowcase into pieces with scissors and gave one to the doctor who had removed the bullet from Lincoln's brain; the doctor gave it to his daughter, who married a governor of Indiana; it descended through that family until they sold it at auction, where Kiriakou bought it.

The same standard is what makes Lincoln's last turd the collection's defining negative case. Kiriakou's wife objected to that lot precisely on provenance grounds, a sideshow museum's display card documents nothing, and the DNA analysis that followed the sale vindicated her.

The tomb key

The loss Kiriakou says he still regrets is the original key to Lincoln's tomb, offered at a large Lincoln sale at Heritage Auctions in Dallas in 2009. He bid to somewhere between $3,600 and $3,800; the key sold for close to $10,000. His wife's assessment was that it was a key.

Authentication and the wider market

Kiriakou extends the provenance principle beyond his own collecting to the art market generally, and is a sceptic of the attribution of Salvator Mundi to Leonardo da Vinci, the painting bought at auction for roughly $450 million by a buyer later understood to be Mohammed bin Salman. His objection is the one he applies to his own lots: the chain of custody was never established. "I think Mohammed bin Salman got ripped off." He allows that the expert who authenticated it may have been acting in good faith under confirmation bias, finding a Leonardo being the thing everyone in that line of work fantasises about.

He notes that an old master painting of the sixteenth or seventeenth century can still be had for around $1,500 if the attribution is uncertain and it is catalogued as "school of" or "circle of", the crack through which the Salvator Mundi dealers slipped.

The gallows plank

On a week spent in Oxford, Ohio with his third son Max, Kiriakou drove to Indianapolis, two hours of farm after farm, to a dealer he buys from because the provenance on everything he sells is impeccable. What he came back with was a hunk of wood from the gallows on which the Lincoln conspirators were hanged, sold together with a scan of a handwritten letter dated 1889 from one of the soldiers on the crew that took the gallows down, who had kept a plank and divided it up among friends.

The gallows were improvised because the site was not a place where people were normally hanged. It still exists, it is now Bolling Air Force Base, renamed as a joint base a couple of years ago, and the ground where the gallows stood is the officers' tennis courts, with no trace that anything happened there. Among those hanged was Mary Surratt, the first woman executed by the United States government, who had plotted with the conspirators and hidden the gun John Wilkes Booth used behind the stove in her kitchen.

The hat, and what is still missing

The stovepipe hat on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History is, Kiriakou notes, the one Lincoln was wearing the night he was killed, and there is no hole in it, because he had taken it off and set it on a table beside him, a gentleman not wearing a hat indoors.

The gap in the collection he most wants to fill is a pardon signed by Lincoln. They are available, at somewhere between $10,000 and $14,000, which he says he is not in a position to spend but hopes to be.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Lincoln's last turd
