Lew Bloom

Lew Bloom (August 8, 1859 – December 12, 1929) was an American vaudeville performer and stage actor who popularized the entertaining tramp character. After retiring from interim in the 1910s, he became a prolific art collector and dealer and along with painted his own native works.

Decades after his death, art conservators discovered that Bloom was the perpetrator of an art forgery involving an oil portrait that he claimed depicted First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.