Warning: fin-de-siècle Wagner deepfake

The image above has been attached to several (generally very kind) articles about my book Wagnerism. It is advertised as an authentic Wagner photo on popular photo-farming services. Getty Images labels it "c. 1875." Alamy places it back in 1843. It dates, in fact, from some time after 1900, when Wagner had been dead for quite a while. It seems to derive from a series of staged photographs produced by the S. Blueh Wien Rotophot company — Rotophot being a popular consortium of postcard publishers. I would guess that it appeared around the time of the Wagner centenary in 1913. Here is another pose from the same series, marked "Erinnerung an Richard Wagner" ("Souvenir of Richard Wagner"). One can also see the Meister brooding at the keyboard as scenes from Act III of Tristan float through his head. The model bears a certain resemblance to Wagner, although Giuseppe Becce caught him better in the 1913 film The Life and Works of Richard Wagner. Thanks to Patrick Swanson and Andrew Newman for soliciting my opinion of the image, thereby sending me on one last Wagner Detour.