Mary Lincoln's engraved opera glasses?

[Eva Elisabeth]

(03-28-2023 12:10 PM)Dave Taylor Wrote:  As intriguing as the opera glasses are, like Roger, my biggest hang up is the lack of any provenance for the piece aside from the inscription. If the glasses had been found in the hands of a Kent descendant who swore to the inscription as a family story, that could help somewhat, but all we know is that it turned up in a random estate sale in England.

The fact that Kent never mentions the glasses is also hard to rectify. Kent testified at the conspiracy trial and two years later at the trial of John Surratt. The only object he mentions finding in the box during those two court appearances is the derringer. But, as you note, this omission doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility that he might have also found Mary Lincoln’s opera glasses. The courts were both more focused on the derringer, and, at that time, Kent may not have wanted to advertise that he took the first lady’s glasses.

But the issue I have is the fact that Kent went on to live the rest of his life in D.C. and often talked about the assassination, lending his pocket knife, and finding the pistol, but never mentioned anything about opera glasses. In a quick newspaper archive search, I found three different accounts of the assassination that William Kent gave in 1891, 1909, and 1916. Each story is pretty much the same. In one of the accounts, it mentions how Kent keeps the penknife he loaned to the doctors to cut open Lincoln’s shirt as a treasured possession. The lack of any mention of opera glasses is telling to me. By the turn of the century, Kent had nothing to fear about revealing he had picked up and kept Mary Lincoln’s opera glasses. The government wasn’t going to try and confiscate them. And if he had given them away, as the inscription on the glasses implies, he surely would have included this nugget of a detail in his retellings of that tragic night.

An interesting piece, but I still don't feel it's legitimate.

Here are links to the different accounts I found from William Kent if you feel like reading them.
1891
1909 Part 1
1909 Part 2
1916
The 1909 Article had this nice picture of William Kent. I have been to his grave in Glenwood Cemetery in D.C. but had never seen a picture of the man before.

Thanks for the links, Dave, and your input, to which I agree. I would love to hear Ed Steers comment on this thread btw...

@ "my biggest hang up is the lack of any provenance for the piece aside from the inscription" - did I miss something, by whom and when was the inscription made??? Is it said anywhere? Kent obviously didn't do it (he wouldn't have talked Cesar-like about himself in 3rd person), and it sounds as if it was done a long time after the assassination. And how was it done? The letters look so perfectly equal, machine-like, not handmade. So what does the inscription prove? Anyone who wanted to sell them (and that was certainly the purpose to inscribe them) could have done it. If there had been a way to really proof them original (like a handwritten statement by Kent) - why possibly "damaging" or altering the glasses by such a lengthy inscription instead of keeping them original?

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(09-27-2019 10:43 AM)Dave Taylor Wrote:  I have some serious doubts. There is no provenance aside from the inscription which could easily have been faked (IMO). It would only take a bit of research to find the name of William Kent and attribute these glasses to him. Yet nowhere in Kent's statement or testimony does he mention anything about these glasses. Kent also lived his life in D.C. dying there in 1917, which makes it harder to explain how the opera glasses got to England.

My main question is if the auction house made an effort to see if these opera glasses fit in Mary Lincoln's opera glass case in the Ford's Theatre collection?

Though, to be honest, I don't know the provenance of that artifact off the top of my head either.

I'm surprised Ed was so emphatic in his opinion it was genuine. There's not enough provenance to make me a believer.

If she owned three or more further opera glasses, where are the other cases? Any still existing?
Interesting these were from Berlin. Where did she get them?