Clown (Fake?)

Available here.

A follower has offered the following insight:
"I think that dag of a clown you posted is the same one that was floating around a few years ago and proved to be a modern dag from a group someone was trying to pass off as old... There was a panel about them at the Daguerreian Society a few years back. Some guy/people in PA supposedly were making them. Once it was ascertained that the same guy was posing in all these super rare images (fisherman, the clown, and more) and experts got a look at the plates, it was obvious they were made recently. Also, that dag just screams "something's not right here" to me not even having seen it before. The exposure is all wrong as is the style, for a 19th century image."

Fake

There's a lot of landmines out there and one of them seems to be these seemingly period watercolors that have been springing up on eBay and other auction houses for the last few years. Their subject matter is generally of fairly significant events or historical figures (Civil War, negro soldiers, etc...) of the 19th century and are typically framed in period frames and backed with pages from 19th century books. Once you've seen a few of them, stylistically they stand out like a sore thumb. The unfortunate part is that quite a few collectors have dropped hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on them. Some can be quite convincing. I even did a post of one a while back! But if you see one, just buy it for it's decorative value because there's little else besides it.