FACE TO FACE

"Face to Face" is my series dedicated to solving some lingering questions about the best known and most popular likenesses of the Old West's most famous characters. As a child I often worshipfully stared into the fierce eyes of lawmen and outlaws- vacuous black pools which frightened and fascinated me. And as an old man, they still tease me, but today I can say, "Yeah, but you didn't make that face. Somebody else made that face for you."

Alas it is true, authentic photos of famous outlaws and gunslingers were extremely scarce, and in many cases artists were called upon around the Turn of the Century to spruce up damaged, faded photographs, to make them more useful in publishing schemes. These "artist's concepts" were blindly accepted as the real deal, and became venerated symbols of our heritage. As historians scoured the West, sometimes they only found ONE authenticated image of some of these famous men. So for fifty or sixty years, there was just one known image of Doc Holliday. One of Billy the Kid. One of Sam Bass. One of John Wesley Hardin. One or two surfaced of Wyatt Earp, but just one of each of his brothers; one each of Ed and Jim Masterson; maybe two or three of Jesse James, (several made after his assassination). In the 1960's and 70's some devious authors dug up some "new" images, and spiced up the conversation and shook up our hard-drives. But any new image was received with a great deal of skepticism. People do not give up their cultural icons very easily. And "provenance" proved to be a fairly unreliable reason to give an image the time of day. This series will show the folly of many authors who "discovered" important new images of famous Old West outlaws. The one on the bottom left had excellent provenance, and is the biggest impostor of all. He totally fails my "Q-5" test.

Now that the art business has changed so much, and computers have made a huge contribution to creative abilities, I find myself with more spare time... and the notion to finally settle some old, nagging questions. Like, what DID these Old West guys look like anyway? And I wanted to start my quest with the elusive, dangerous, enigmatic Doc Holliday. I wanted to be, as close as artistically and photographically possible, finally face to face with him.

I found a good representation (above) of the standard Doc- Almost identical to the one I first studied in George Hendricks's The Badman of the West around 1964; the one that had been copied and used hundreds of times since its creation... and which I was sure was way off base, and an insult to historicity. It had that ridiculous little curl whipping up and out from the top of Doc's head into space, like Doc was really just a chocolate ice cream advertising mascot. So I call this one "Dairy Queen Doc." Another version below, with its high contrast and man-eating countenance reminded me more of Blackjack Ketchum than anybody.

I was pretty sure that the artist who made this famous portrait of Doc which I had tattooed in my brain for sixty years was inspired by Blackjack or some other bad-ass long ago when he made the illustration. Most of Blackjack's features are certainly compatable with the Old West icon of Doc which we know and love. The heavy, straight eyebrows, the deep chin, the black hair. Then over the years, modifications showed up, with slight variations, as if many artists had taken a shot at doing justice to the wandering dentist cum gunman. The more they tried, the more scary and pin-headed he got. Emaciated and wooly-browed, his mammoth mustache grew longer and his dependable curl always waved on high, flipping an eternal bird to authority. But was this beloved cartoon similar at all to Doc Holliday? I had my doubts.

I had discovered more recent historical finds which intrigued me, (I dubbed the "blondes") and especially one of John Henry Holliday about the time he attended dental school. And yes, Holliday was more or less blonde. It amazingly lined up with another obscure latecomer (above), one supposedly of Holliday in his later years. To me, the fact that they both had decent provenance and were in almost 100% agreement according to my Q-5 test, made me decide to make them the baseline...

Amazingly, one of the oldest and best known images lined up fairly well, in spite of over one hundred years of artistic modifications. But significantly, the evolutionary Dairy Queen Doc had shrunk his cranium and enlarged his chin. So I took my Photoshop after it...

Here is my contribution... a digital sketch to suggest what Doc Holliday may have actually looked like. It is in accord with the "Blondes" and yet built upon on the DQ classic. It's nice to know that Doc's famous face is not far off base!