Portrait of Senator Solomon W. Downs

I have written about Senator Downs before on this blog. What caught my interest was something I recently found.

While looking on the Internet Archives, I found they had digitized the Louisiana Historical Quarterly journal. In the January, 1934 issue (you can read it here: https://archive.org/details/per_louisiana-historical-quarterly_the-louisiana-historical-quarterly_1934-01_17_1/page/6/mode/2up?q=%22Ouachita+Parish%22) Minnie Markette Ruffin (yes THAT Minnie Ruffin) wrote an article about Senator Solomon Downs, shortly before his grave was rediscovered. On page 6 was a very dark photo of Senator Downs. I knew we had those old issues in our collection. I went to our shelves and found an original issue. Here is the photo scanned from the page:

I KNOW I have read Minnie Ruffin’s article before. What I didn’t remember was the picture. It never clicked in my head. I knew of two other depictions of him. One, that is most used, is a very scratched up Matthew Brady portrait you can see on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_W._Downs#/media/File:Solomon_Weathersbee_Downs.jpg

The second is a line drawing you can see here: https://historica.fandom.com/wiki/Solomon_W._Downs?file=Solomon_W._Downs.jpg

I did a reverse image search on Bing and I can find no other website that has the above photo! It looks so darn close to the scratched Brady photo, that it makes me wonder if it is a Brady photo too, from the same sitting! It looks like he buttoned his coat and turned to face the camera! My boss thinks it is a painting though.