Ophelia--A New York Deb and her Artwork

(The story behind the photo)

Collectors of antique photographs take special pride in finding an identified antique portrait, taken before 1900, and then unearthing something that belonged to the subject—for instance, inheriting great-grandmother’s portrait as well as the brooch she was wearing when the photo was taken.

Whenever I examine a cased image (housed in a small hard case that opens like a book and generally has a velvet  lining opposite the image) I always gently pry the image “sandwich” –  a daguerreotype or ambrotype protected by glass with a brass mat and a metal edge to hold it all together—and look behind the image.  That’s where you can find many treasures—names, dates, an obituary, love poem, maybe an advertising card for the photographer, or even a lock of the subject’s hair.

Through dumb luck I managed to find this portrait of a young lady with the unusual name of Ophelia Merle, taken in New York in the 1850’s by Jeremiah Gurney, the most celebrated photographer of the daguerreian era. Then I discovered and bought a drawing by the same young lady.

Gurney is my favorite daguerreotype artist, bar none.   He worked up the street (Broadway) from Matthew Brady, won more awards than anyone else and was considered the pre-eminent photographer in the United States throughout his long career.  He photographed New York’s high society and most of the eminent men of his day (and with his son scooped the other photographers to photograph Lincoln’s body after the assassination.)

In 2006 I was delighted to find on E-Bay this ¼ plate Gurney portrait of a young woman --identified as “Ophelia Merle” by a contemporary paper label pinned to the velvet.  The mat was stamped “J Gurney, 349 Broadway”. This was Gurney’s second studio, which he occupied from 1852 to 1858— nine rooms where New York’s most distinguished citizens came to have their portraits taken and to lounge around the palatial reception room, admiring the daguerreotypes on display.

The portrait of Ophelia illustrates the chair, the tablecloth and the exact pose that Gurney used for nearly all the women he photographed during this period. (He used different props and poses for men and children.) Every photographer labored to find the pose that would most gracefully display a woman’s face, body and hands.  The subject had to hold the pose for quite a few seconds, and many photographers used a head brace to make sure they didn’t move.  Children were often strapped into their chair and babies sometimes could not be kept still until the photographer had to throw a sheet over the mother and then place the tot in her lap for what I like to call a “hidden mother” portrait.  I doubt that Gurney every was reduced to such measures.

As soon as I bought this image from a woman in Florida, I googled the unusual name and discovered that someone else on E-Bay was selling a pencil drawing by one Ophelia Merle.  He called it “England 1849, Romantic Castle View, Woman Artist”. He wrote that he had earlier sold “another drawing from this artist, that one dated 1849”.

So I bought it.  For under fifty dollars!

Since then I’ve learned more about Ophelia Merle. She was clearly not a beauty, but she was well-placed in New York’s social hierarchy, with French-speaking parents and ancestors from Switzerland. Her full name in New York’s “Who’s Who” was  “Ophelia Merle d’Aubigné.”  She was born on Sept. 28, 1835, married in 1862 to Lyman Beecher Carhart of Peekskill, New York, gave birth to two children (also listed in  “Who’s Who in New York City & State”), and she died on July 7, 1893 at the age of 57.   

If Ophelia did create this drawing in 1849, she was only 14 at the time. Clearly she was older when Gurney photographed her (in the studio he used from 1852 to 1858).  At that point she was a young lady being introduced to society, and having a Gurney portrait wouldn’t hurt her chances of finding a suitable match.  She was married to the young man from Peekskill, N. Y.  in  1862, when she was 27.

In those days, young women from the best families were educated in music, art, languages and etiquette.  Ophelia seems to have been an especially skilled artist, and was probably traveling (with her father Guillaume?) to visit relatives, including her uncle, the Rev. Jean H. of Geneva, Switzerland, when she saw and drew this pastoral scene.

I suspect Ophelia would be pleased to know that today, more than 150 years after she made it, her drawing and her Gurney portrait are together again.

I was wrong about the First Woman Writer in America!

Pretty embarrassing for an English major! I mean, I even took an oral exam in Middle English in college while also reading a Shakespeare play every day.  But yesterday, as soon as I posted “America’s First Woman Author – Hannah Adams”, inspired by a portrait on a daguerreotype in my collection, I received a number of comments from people better informed than I, all asking “What about Anne Bradstreet?"

Anne Bradstreet was born in 1612 in England to an aristocratic family, married  Simon Bradstreet at the age of 16, and sailed to America with other Puritan emigrants in 1630.  Surviving the deadly travails of the voyage and the starvation of the first months, these Puritans soon founded the city of Boston (and Harvard University).  Eventually Anne had eight children and was sickly all her life.  She died at 50.

In 1650, a book of her poems was published in London as “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America” composed by “A Gentlewoman from Those Parts.” This made Anne the first woman poet published –both in England and the New World.

So what about Hannah Adams, who was born in 1755 and published her first book in 1784-- 134 years after Anne’s book of poetry?

I went back to my research on Hannah Adams, and saw that each biographer had described her carefully as:

“… the first woman in the United States who made literature a profession.”

“… the first American woman to support herself by writing.”

“… the first American author to make a living solely from writing.”

So, although yesterday I wrongly ignored Anne Bradstreet, I was partly right in that Hannah was the first female professional writer who supported herself with her writing.  (She never married and her father went bankrupt.)

I’m delighted that my literary readers corrected me and pointed to Anne Bradstreet, whom I should have remembered from my English Major days.  It was a woman friend from my high school English class—where we were classmates over fifty years ago-- who first pointed out my slip yesterday.

But I’m also still thrilled to own a daguerreotype of Hannah Adams, the first female professional writer, who championed education for women and lobbied for the first copyright laws in our country.  Like Anne Bradstreet, she was one of our feminist godparents and a brave example to all women writers.

America’s First Woman Author (The Story Behind the Photograph)

One of the categories of antique photographs that I collect is photos of paintings, especially portraits.  Photography began in 1839 with the daguerreotype process, and many Americans quickly went to a photographer’s studio carrying a painting of a deceased relative—for how else would future generations remember the face of their ancestor?

The most touching example of this that I’ve seen was a daguerreotype of a man seated in a chair, flanked by his young children, holding on his lap a primitive painting of what was undoubtedly his deceased wife.  Even separated by death, he gathered the whole family together for the only photograph they would ever have.

I bought this sixth plate daguerreotype of an old woman wearing a mob cap (much like Martha Washington) from a seller on E-Bay in 1999.   He wrote that it was “identified by the previous owner as Hannah Adams (1755-1831)”.  He then quoted part of a biography that identified her as  the “first American woman to support herself by writing.”

I researched Hannah and her works. Born in Medfield, MA, the second of five children of a farmer and bookseller named Thomas Adams, Hannah was sickly and was not sent to school.  She read on her own and learned Latin and Greek from divinity students who boarded in their house. Her mother died when she was only 12.

Hannah’s father became bankrupt when she was 17. She supported herself during the Revolutionary War by making lace and later by teaching. (Her father, a scholarly man, also tutored students from Harvard who boarded with them “on rustification”—country leave from classes in Cambridge.)

Hannah was curious about all varieties of religion.  She once said “My first idea of Heaven was of a place where we should find our thirst for knowledge fully gratified.”As she studied, she found herself “disgusted” by the “lack of candor” of writers about religion, who always seemed to prefer one denomination over another—so she determined to write a book comparing all religions  without showing preference for any one. In 1784 she published the result, under the verbose title: “An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects which Have Appeared from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day”.  It sold out, but her agent kept all the money, which led Hannah to lobby for the United States’ first copyright law, passed in 1790.

More books came from this prolific author, mostly about history and religion.  She was much sought after as a dinner guest and houseguest during an era when no women were allowed to attend university. According to one biographer, “She was cherished by affluent New England women as an embodiment of the benefits of permitting female equality in higher education.” When she died in 1831, she was the first of many important figures to be buried in the new Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Although Hannah was a distant cousin of President John Adams and stayed for two weeks at his house, she never traveled beyond New England, and she never married.

As always, I tried to verify that my daguerreotype was in fact Hannah Adams.  The engraving above is the only authenticated image of her that I could find.  It’s obviously based on a painting, and “my” Hannah is a painting, so we’re dependent on the skills and vision of the two artists for an answer.  Nevertheless,  I’m happy that the image I bought, of a crone who was born before the American Revolution, introduced me to Hannah, the feisty and intelligent trailblazer of every woman writer came after.

A White Slave Girl “Mulatto Raised by Charles Sumner”

The Story Behind the Photo

(Please click on the photos to make them bigger.)

When I began collecting antique photographs about twenty years ago, like most collectors I started out buying everything I could find. Then, as I gained expertise, I began to specialize, gravitating toward early images of children, twins (which I wrote about in a April 29, 2010 blog post: “Diane Arbus and Spooky Twins”) and photographs reflecting attitudes toward race and slavery.  (For example, I wrote about the image of “The Scarred Back of a Slave Named Gordon” in a post dated Oct. 2, 2009.  My information about that image was also printed in the New York Times book review of Oct. 4, 2009).

 While collecting slave photographs, I became fascinated with the “white slave children of Louisiana” as I call the series of CDV (carte-de-visite) photos of freed children from New Orleans who appear to be completely white. These small, cardboard-mounted photos were sold in great quantities by abolitionists during the Civil War.  On the back of each photo was printed: “The nett [sic] proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the Department of the Gulf, now under the command of Maj. Gen. Banks.”

I had so many questions about these CDVs.  First, why did the abolitionists go down to the schools of freed slaves in New Orleans and pull out only those who appeared to be white, then send the children up to New York and Philadelphia to be dressed in fine clothes and posed in sentimental scenes for photos to sell?  Why did black-appearing children not get chosen for this? And how did these former slave children feel about being taken away from their mothers, paraded up north for the media like zoo animals and then sent back down South?  (They even got kicked out of their hotel in Philadelphia when the owner discovered they weren’t “really” white.)

Through research, I’ve learned the answers to some of these questions about the Louisiana CDVs, but that story is for another day when I’ll have enough space to analyze this early attempt to raise funds and arouse anti-slavery sentiment through the new-fangled “scientific” process of photography.

Today I’m only focusing on one photograph that was made about nine years before the Civil War CDVs.  It’s a ninth-plate daguerreotype of a little girl in a plaid dress that I bought on E-Bay in 2000. 

The seller, from Tennessee, included with this cased image information on where it was found. “This…photograph was purchased at Headley’s Auction in Winchester VA, July 1997.  It came…out of the “Ashgrove” estate in Vienna, VA. The house originated as a hunting lodge in 1740 …and was  sold to James Sherman in 1850, who would never  own or hire a slave.  He died in 1865 and passed it to his son, Capt. Franklin Sherman, Tenth Mich. Cavalry.  Capt Sherman’s wife Caroline (Alvord, a native of Mass.) came to the country in 1865 to teach the children of the newly freed slaves.”

The most intriguing thing about this daguerreotype, of course, was the faded inch-square piece of paper glued to the back of the case upon which someone has printed  “Mulatto raised by Charles Sumner”.

I put this image aside in 2000 along with the papers the buyer had sent me about the Ashford plantation, and forgot all about them.

Then, last November, I had a visit from Greg Fried, a professor at  Suffolk University in Boston who wanted to scan some of my photographs for a new web site he was preparing called  “Mirror of Race” (www.mirrorofrace.org.) I showed him the Louisiana CDVs and the daguerreotype of the “Sumner-raised” child. After he left, I went on Google and typed in the words  “Charles Sumner” and “slave”.  I discovered a short article from the New York Times dated March 9, 1855, which read:

A WHITE SLAVE FROM VIRGINIA. We received a visit yesterday from an interesting little girl, — who, less than a month since, was a slave belonging to Judge NEAL, of Alexandria, Va. Our readers will remember that we lately published a letter, addressed by Hon. CHARLES SUMNER, to some friends in Boston, accompanying a daguerreotype which that gentleman had forwarded to his friends in this city, and which he described as the portrait of a real "Ida May," — a young female slave, so white as to defy the acutest judge to detect in her features, complexion, hair, or general appearance, the slightest trace of Negro blood. It was this child that visited our office, accompanied by CHARLES H. BRAINARD, in whose care she was placed by Mr. SUMNER, for transmission to Boston. Her history is briefly as follows: Her name is MARY MILDRED BOTTS; her father escaped from the estate of Judge NEAL, Alexandria, six years ago and took refuge in Boston. Two years since he purchased his freedom for $600, his wife and three children being still in bondage. The good feeling of his Boston friends induced them to subscribe for the purchase of his family, and three weeks since, through the agency of Hon. CHARLES SUMNER, the purchase was effected, $800 being paid for the family. They created quite a sensation in Washington, and were provided with a passage in the first class cars in their journey to this city, whence they took their way last evening by the Fall River route to Boston. The child was exhibited yesterday to many prominent individuals in the City, and the general sentiment, in which we fully concur, was one of astonishment that she should ever have been held a slave. She was one of the fairest and most indisputable white children that we have ever seen.

This discovery got my adrenaline going. I googled “Mary Mildred Botts” and learned that the white-appearing slave child who was  admired by the New York Times was discussed in a 2008 book called  “Raising Freedom’s Child—Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery,” written by a University of New Orleans professor, Mary Niall Mitchell, who (small world!) was someone I had communicated with six years ago while trying to research the Louisiana CDV’s.  I immediately ordered the book from Amazon.

When it arrived, I was stunned to find on page 73 a photo of Mary Botts that was the mirror image of MY dag. (The one in the book was from the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.)  Prof. Mitchell gave more explanation about why this young girl was photographed and brought north by Charles Sumner.

“By the eve of the Civil War, abolitionists recognized the potential of white-looking children for stirring up antislavery sentiment…Although it was the image of a raggedy, motherless Topsy that viewers might have expected to see in a photograph of a slave girl, it was the “innocent”, “pure,” and “well-loved” white child who appeared, a child who needed the protection of the northern white public.

“The sponsors of seven-year-old Mary Mildred Botts, a freed child from Virginia, may have been the first to capitalize on these ideas, as early as 1855.  Her story also marks the beginning of efforts to use photography (in Mary Botts’s case, the daguerreotype, as the carte-de-visite format was not yet available) in the service of raising sentiment and support for the abolitionist cause.  (bold-facing mine.)

“…In his own characterization of Mary Botts,” Mitchell continues, “Sumner set a pattern that other abolitionists would follow.  In a letter printed in both the Boston Telegraph and the New York Daily Times, he compared Mary Botts to a fictional white girl who had been kidnapped and enslaved, the protagonist in Mary Hayden Pike’s antislavery novel Ida May:  ‘She is bright and intelligent—another Ida May,’ [Sumner wrote] ‘I think her presence among us (in Boston) will be more effective than any speech I can make.’”

This comparison of Mary Botts to the fictional kidnapped white girl worked well for Sumner and the Abolitionists and made the little freed slave quite a local celebrity.  Prof. Mitchell quotes the diary of a Quaker woman named Hannah Marsh Inman who saw Mary Botts at  a meeting house in Worcester, MA (which happens to be where I live now).  On March 1, 1855, Hannah wrote:  “Evening all went to the soiree at the Hall.  Little Ida May, the white slave was there from Boston.”

Sumner realized that he was on to a good thing and circulated   daguerreotypes of the child to prove her whiteness to those who might doubt.  (Keep in mind—the daguerreotype process was the first one ever made available—by Daguerre in 1839-- and the images “written by the sun” on the silvered copper plate were considered undeniable scientific proof of the sitter’s appearance.)  

Sumner passed a daguerreotype of Mary Botts around the Massachusetts State Legislature “as an illustration of slavery” and sent one to John. A. Andrews, the governor of Massachusetts.

Only a year after parading Mary Botts through New York, Boston and Worcester and dubbing her “The real Ida May”,  Charles Sumner’s devout abolitionist views  led him to a crippling disaster, when, in 1856, he was so badly beaten on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks,  who broke a cane over his head, that it would take years of therapy before Sumner could return to the Senate.

As soon as I realized that my dag of Mary Botts was one of the images used by Sumner himself to advance the abolitionist cause, I got into an excited e-mail correspondence with the book’s author, Professor Mitchell, and  Prof. Greg Fried, who pointed out something I’d forgotten: an advertising card on the back of my image showed that it was “Taken with the Double Camera For 25 Cents by Taber & Co., successors to Tyler & Co. Cor. Winter & Washington Sts. Boston”,  while the mirror image belonging to the  Massachusetts Historical Society was taken by Julian Vannerson, probably in Richmond,  Virginia, and seems sharper than mine, so mine must be a copy dag. (The only way to copy a daguerreotype is to take a new daguerreotype of it.  Each daguerreotype is one of a kind.  Taber’s price of 25 cents sounds affordable, but at the time, the average working man made only about a dollar a day.)

 Prof. Mitchell is currently working on a book about Mary Botts that will tell more about this former slave’s life, including the drama of how Sumner purchased her and spirited her out of Virginia, how he introduced her to the media and society as a  living advocate for the abolitionist cause, and how her family settled in the free black community in Boston.

I’m eager to learn the rest of the story, but, for now, it’s enough of a thrill just to know that the daguerreotype, taken in 1855, that is part of my collection may represent one of the first efforts EVER to use the modern discovery of photography to touch people’s emotions and change their minds.  This small image of a seven-year-old girl may be an example of the first time photography was used for propaganda, but it was certainly not the last.

Older Women and Long Hair—In the Olden Days.

On October 21, The New York Times ran an essay called “Why Can’t Middle-Aged Women Have Long Hair? by Dominique Browning,  originally written for her blog  “SlowLoveLife.”

The subject clearly hit a nerve. The Times received 1200 comments, overwhelming its editors until they finally ordered an end to the discussion. 

Dominique Browning cited the way her own long hair disturbed people, including her mother, because she was well over 40 (In fact she’s 55).  She asked why long flowing locks were considered inappropriate for older women. “Why do people judge middle-aged long hair so harshly?” 

Passionate opinions were submitted on both sides of the argument.

Because I’m an avid collector of antique pre-1900 photographs, I wondered if some of the acrimony about long hair may have been coming from our national subconscious.   Did we inherit the attitudes of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation—that long hair was too sexy to be seen in public—and do we even today feel that sexy hair is not appropriate for women of a certain age?

In my grandmother’s day (she was married—to a Presbyterian minister—in 1896) a girl was expected to pile her locks on top of her head on the day she became a woman and entered society.  She was supposed to bind her tresses into a prim bun with hairpins, and then never let any man see her with her hair down except for her husband.

In fact the older women portrayed in my earliest daguerreotypes often wear lace mob caps—like Martha Washington—to cover their hair INSIDE THE HOUSE. (Their outdoor bonnets would be put on top of these caps.)

You don’t need to be an anthropologist to draw a parallel from the mob caps of America’s founding mothers to the hijabs of Muslim countries today.

Before 1900, no reputable woman would wear cosmetics or dye her hair.   (I once owned a Ladies Home Journal magazine from the  early 20^th century that solemnly warned:  women who dye their hair will go mad.)

Today’s erogenous zones—bosom, legs, butt, thighs—were never seen in the early days of photography.  (The first photographs were  daguerreotypes, beginning in 1839 .)

In the dags in my collection from the 1840’s and 1850’s, women’s breasts were tightly bound and a flat piece of wood or whalebone, called a busk, was inserted into the corset, so that it was physically impossible to slouch.

Here’ s a definition I found on the internet:

Originally, a busk was a piece of carved wood or bone that was set into a pocket in a corset front to make the front completely straight and ridged. Busks were nearly always used in Tudor and Elizabethan corsets, and in certain styles of the 17th and 18th, and the early 19th century.

Elaborately carved busks were a common gift from a young man to his sweetheart. Sailors carved bones with Scrimshaw designs as gifts for the girls back home

So for our grandmothers, the sexiest thing they had going for them was long, beautiful hair.  Victorian advertisements  for hair-growing lotions were a sort of soft-core porn,  often featuring voluptuous women naked except for their astonishingly full and long hair.  (Like Lady Godiva.  And then there’s Rapunzel—the subject of the animated film “Tangled” which is currently a huge success.  I think long hair is definitely having a moment right now.)

Then there came a moment—in the 1920’s—when cutting one’s hair into a short, flapper’s bob was considered scandalous, daring, a statement of female rebellion against society’s mores—like smoking a cigarette in public. 

For the best description of just how daring short hair was in the twenties, check out F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” from 1922.  (You can find it on line.)  A sophisticated, popular “mean girl” tricks her unpopular country cousin into bobbing her hair in hopes of winning popularity. When it backfires, the country cousin takes revenge in kind.

Today the tables have turned again—the rebel is not the woman who bobs her hair—she’s the women of middle age or beyond (even crone-hood!) who dares to wear her gray-streaked or white hair long, even though she’s far past girlhood.  I can think of a handful of well-aged women who flaunt their flowing locks—Cher, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton.  Among personal friends, I immediately think of a very chic Manhattan beauty, Marina, whose cascade of white hair has become her trademark and earned her a place in a New York Times feature about people who have their own unique style.

Personally I’ve never worn my hair long—except for the period in the  late sixties when I rocked a beehive.  I’ve always taken the easy way out, with short hair, but for those middle-aged women like Dominique Browning, and even past-middle-aged beauties courageous enough to flaunt their crowning glory, I think there should be a medal of honor, say a Croix de Cheveux.

It's Not the Earliest Photo of a Human Being Ever, Mr. Krulwich

I keep seeing on the internet the very popular blog post from Robert Krulwich of NPR, who writes about science--the post in which he asked "Is this the earliest photograph of a human being ever?" And he's talking about a daguerreotype taken in Cincinnati in 1848.

Well, it's not, and it's driving me crazy to keep reading this. So I finally posted the following comment on his blog--don't know if he'll ever read it.

"I hope I am not the first collector of antique photographs to write and tell you that a photograph of a human being dated 1848 is not at all early, much less "the first photo of a human being ever." Daguerre revealed the secrets of his process in Paris in August of 1839 and Samuel B. Morse brought the process to the United States and had taken a successful daguerreotype of a church by September 28th, 1839.. (the same guy who invented the telegraph.) He immediately started taking portraits and by early Oct. 1839 he had succeeded in making "full length portraits of my daughter single and also in groups with some of her young friends...taken out of doors, on the roof of a building in the full sunlight, with the eyes closed. The time was from ten to twenty minutes."" in Newhall's book "The Daguerreotype in America" you will find a "self-portrait of Henry Fitz Jr, " taken around 1839--also with his eyes closed due to the long exposure time needed. By the 1840's the exposure time was considerably shorter, eyes were open and daguerreotype mania was sweeping across America. I have in my own collection many daguerreotypes of humans taken well before the 1848 Cincinnati image that you propose is "one of the first ever taken."

Joan Gage
October 27, 2010 9:54:26 PM EDT

And just so you'll know what he wrote in the first place, it's this:

First Photo Of A Human Being Ever?

by ROBERT KRULWICH
Back in September, we posted a set of old photos of Cincinnati daguerreotypes from 1848 where I caught a glimpse of two people at the Ohio River's edge. That would make them among the very first people ever to appear in a candid photograph. 1848 is a long time ago. They looked like a pair of men, one tall, the other short. They were standing with what looked like a bucket between them. I figured they were there to fetch some water. I then went on in my way to talk about cholera.
Well, an eagle-eyed reader who calls himself Hokumburg (and has a spectacular blog of his own, The Hokumburg Goombah) did his own investigation, enlarged our photo, and peered more closely:

University of Rochester




And he wrote:
I have lightened it up a bit and messed with the contrast a little, and I think the man on the left is standing behind the wooden beam wall (wharf? dock?) with his left leg up on the wall and his left hand resting on his knee, while the man on the right is standing on top of that wall. What do you think?

Well, what I think is that he's right. I think he's picked up details that escaped even the very good folks at the University of Rochester and the conservation lab at George Eastman House. I think he’s a superb forensic picture-watcher.
Which does raise the intriguing (and unanswerable) question, what were those guys doing at the river’s edge? If not hoisting water in a bucket, what? His answer:
I think they've just come down to stare at the river, as people here in St. Louis go down to stare at the Mississippi every day. A river has an irresistible pull on some of us...

Louis Daguerre/via hokumburg.com


My admiration for Hokumburg jumped another notch when I discovered that on his own blog he'd come up with a city photo older than ours, which he claims may contain the "first photograph of a human being." Wow! I didn’t check with the experts, but here's his picture.
It comes from 1838 and was taken by Louis Daguerre himself. The scene is from Paris. It's a view of the Boulevard du Temple.
He writes there were probably people wandering through this scene on that day, but if they didn’t stay still, the camera would have missed them. Only one man shows up. He is on the sidewalk down on the lower left of the photo.
To achieve this image (one of his earliest attempts), he exposed a chemically treated metal plate for ten minutes. Others were walking or riding in carriages down that busy street that day, but because they moved, they didn't show up. Only this guy stood still long enough — maybe to have his boots shined — to leave an image.
Other primitive forms of photography had preceded this picture by over a decade. But this anonymous shadowy man is the first human being to ever have his picture taken. There is also the very faint image of the bootblack bent over his work.
Odds are neither of them ever knew they were making history that day.
I am impressed. Thank you Mr. Hokumburg, whoever you are. (Dunno why, but I am guessing you are a "mister.")


Joan says: Now there is a possibility tht the tiny, almost invisible figure in the Daguerre image might be the first image of a human being ever--if it was in 1838--but the dags. that Morse took of his children are certainly in the running--because we know the dates for those.

Diane Arbus and Spooky Twins

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them)


Long before she killed herself in 1971 at the age of 48, (pills, slashed wrists, found in the bathtub two days later), the photographer Diane Arbus told a friend she was afraid that she would be remembered simply as “the photographer of freaks.”

Today that’s exactly how she is remembered for her searing, macabre photographs of “deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transvestites, nudists, circus performers) or else of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal,” as one biographer described her favorite subjects.

But one of her most famous photographs (on the left above) is not of circus freaks or mentally challenged people, but of identical twin girls taken in Roselle, N.J. in 1967.

This eerie photograph of young sisters Cathleen and Colleen Wade has been copied and echoed many times—including in Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘”The Shining” with its twin girl ghosts. In fact there’s a TV commercial on right now (for kitchen appliances) with a pair of similar sinister girls.

A print of Arbus’s twins was sold at auction for $478,000 in 2004 and a couple of months ago I saw another one at the AIPAD photography show in New York that was priced at around $275,000 for a tiny print with Arbus’s notes on the back.

Let’s face it, there’s something intrinsically spooky about twins—especially identical twins—because it’s shocking to see the same individual, the same face, doubled and standing side by side. Maybe that’s why I (and many other collectors) love to find vintage photographic images of twins. They always seem to look like something out of Stephen King.

The 1/6 plate daguerreotype, #1, that I have above next to the Arbus twins, is my favorite dag ever. In my opinion it’s just as good – if not better -- than the Arbus image. The two little girls, who were photographed in the 1840’s or 1850’s, look amazingly like the twins from New Jersey. Compare the faces of the girls on the left in each photo.

The stern young ladies in image #1 are each holding a daguerreotype case inlaid with mother of pearl, and they wear identical gold-tinted pendents and dresses.

(In vintage photos it’s very common for siblings—not just twins -- to be dressed alike, because Mom would buy a long length of fabric and then the dressmaker would come around to stitch up clothing for all the kids from the same bolt of cloth.)

These are some of my prize twin images—all of them spooky. In the early days of photography, people were not only intimidated by this modern invention, they were warned not to move—certainly not to smile—because it would blur the image. Children were often strapped into a chair with their heads in a brace. No wonder they often look terrified!



Images 1 , 2, 3, 4 and 5 above are all daguerreotypes—the very earliest photographic process. Don’t you love the dour sisters in the checkerboard dresses in #3 (not a flattering pattern!) and next to them the long-faced girls in plaid. The sisters in image 5 I suspect, because of their somber clothing and jewelry, may be in mourning.



The girls holding books in image 6 are not identical, but the men in image 7 are mirror images of each other. I love how their top-knots curl in opposite directions. (Six and 7 are ambrotypes—negative images on glass—popular from 1854 to 1865.) People were always worried about how to pose their hands in these early days, and the photographer would arrange hands awkwardly like the ones you see here.



The two women in image 9 may not be twins, or even sisters, but I cherish them because they are feminists from the mid-1800’s! Written in the case behind their daguerreotype is this: “Mary, you and my self are still left single/ while others are double and full of trouble. Your KPL”



Photos 11 to 14 are tintypes, which became popular during the Civil War and continued into the 1900’s. The girls in 11 and the boys in 12 have high button shoes, and the ladies in #14, in ruffled skirts, are posed in a photographer’s studio. Check out the bathing beauties in #13, on a holiday at the seashore (but posed in front of a painted canvas background.)



The toddlers in # 15 are boy/girl twins. (Boys wore dresses until after age 5.) Their mother has written on the back of the cabinet card “Twins. Left, Louise Bertha Inez Forte. Right Louis Bertrand Forte. Born June 13th, 1893 at 2 p.m. in West Newton. Louis was born 5 minutes after Louise.”

An equally helpful relative noted the names of the young flappers in image #16, who look very chic in their cloche hats, as “Alice Antoinette Howland and Harriet Alma Howland, 1926.” Their relaxed pose in their fur-collared coats makes for a beautiful portrait, but none of the twins can compare to my ghostly, sour-faced girls from 170 years ago in image #1.

My Hunt for Emily Dickinson

(Please click on the photos to enlarge them.)


There are a few photographs of long-dead celebrities that are so rare, people will pay close to a million dollars for them. If you come across a previously unknown image of, say, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, John Brown, John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, to name a few, you have discovered a real treasure.

One of these iconic images would be a new portrait of Emily Dickinson. That’s what a professor at the University of North Carolina, Philip F. Gura, thought he had found on an E-Bay auction that he won on April 12, 2000. It was an albumen photograph (the bottom row above).

Later Gura wrote a delightful description of his torturous six-month search to validate the image. It’s called “How I Met and Dated Miss Emily Dickinson: An Adventure on eBay.”

Read it on http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-02/gura/

Gura wrote about Emily Dickinson: “Even though she lived when the new invention of photography was changing the ways people thought about themselves, there is only one known photographic likeness of her, taken by William C. North. It was made between December 1846 and March 1847, and shows a thin teenager suffering from what her family took as the first symptoms of tuberculosis.

“A second photograph of Dickinson has long been the Holy Grail of artifacts for scholars in my field…”

Gura paid $481 to win the albumen photograph with “Emily Dickinson” written on the back. As soon as it arrived from the eBay seller, the professor set about trying to validate it. He soon had calls from The New York Times and the New Yorker, who were vying to be the first with the news of his discovery.

Then NPR and many papers around the world were knocking at his door. After much trouble, Gura finally found a forensic anthropologist who was able to measure and compare various anatomical landmarks on the two faces (the original verified dag above left and the new-found albumen photo in the third row). This seems so much quicker and easier on TV shows like CSI and Bones!

Meanwhile two historians of costume analyzed the sitter’s clothing and determined that the albumen photo was a copy of an original daguerreotype taken sometime between 1848 and 1853.

In the one verified image of Emily — the daguerreotype at the upper left-- she is either sixteen or 17 years old. It was taken at Mt. Holyoke and is in the possession of Amherst College.

After all his research, Prof. Gura still doesn’t have a positive "yes" answer. But he believes that it is indeed Emily and quotes one reporter: “Although the forensic analysis of Gura’s photo strongly suggests the woman is ED, no one can say for sure. By the same token, no one apparently can say that the woman is NOT Dickinson.”

Something that was not reported by international media, (but is reported here exclusively on A Rolling Crone), is that I had a very similar experience to Philip Gura’s. But it happened exactly four months earlier. On Jan. 13, 2000, I purchased on eBay a 1/6 plate daguerreotype of a young woman who looked strikingly like Emily Dickinson. The famous verified Emily image is on the left above, on the right is my dag, which I purchased for $127.50 from a seller in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

The eBay auction had the title “Fine Dag – Lovely Woman – Emily Dickinson???”

But the seller was not making any claims that he couldn’t prove: “Purchased some time ago from an estate auctioned [sic] near Amherst, Mass. A fine daguerreotype…an intriguing and attractive young woman. …Some say she is, some say she looks like, Emily Dickinson. And some say not. Draw your own conclusion (there is one surviving dag of this noted Amherst author.) A fine daguerreotype either way.”

I studied the small photo on eBay and tried to compare it to the one verified dag. Like Philip Gura some months later, I waited in suspense for it to arrive. I imagined the excitement, the glory, the press attention if it proved to be an actual second image of the Belle of Amherst.

You must admit, looking at the two dags side by side, that the resemblance is striking. Even the style of dress and hair and the pose itself. (Emily is near a book and holding what I think is a flower in the official dag. In my image the woman has an adorable beaded bag hanging from her arm. They even seem to be wearing the same kind of dark bracelet, which may or may not be a mourning bracelet made of human hair.)

But I didn’t have to consult forensic anthropologists and costume historians to validate my image when it came. I took one look at the actual dag that lay in my hand and I realized she couldn’t be the real Emily, because, judging from the one true photograph, Emily had dark brown eyes and the woman in MY image had pale blue eyes.

I should have known this, because Emily once wrote to an admirer (who asked for a portrait) this description of herself: “I…am small, like the Wren, and my Hair is bold, like the Chestnut Bur-and my Eyes, like the Sherry in the Glass, that the guest leaves – would this do just as well?”

So mine is not a priceless iconic image, and the world’s press is not about to come calling — as it did four months later when Professor Gura discovered his image of ED on eBay. But I like ”my” Emily anyway and would never part with her, because this woman was a contemporary, perhaps a neighbor — perhaps even a relative -- of the real Emily. She certainly has a remarkable resemblance to the mysterious and secretive Belle of Amherst, who wore white and refused to come out of her room in the last years of her life, talking to visitors through a closed door.

And then after her death, her sister Lavina discovered the 1800 poems hidden away in her drawer. The first volume was published four years after Emily diedin 1886 at the age of 55.

A Mystery – Is this a Lost Portrait of Lord Byron?

(The story behind the photograph)

Last weekend I was lucky to attend a couple of fascinating photo shows in New York City including the AIPAD photography show in the Park Avenue Armory, featuring vintage and contemporary photos at amazingly high prices.

At another photo show nearby I did find some vintage photos I could afford, and one of them was a 1/4 plate ambrotype of an oil painting of Lord Byron in a half case. It even had tinted cheeks. (It’s at the top row above—both in and out of its protective case, metal mat, preserver and cover glass. Click on it to make it bigger.)

The dealer who sold me the image said he thought it was “some actor” but I knew that it was the famous English poet George Gordon Lord Byron. In fact I thought it was a photograph of some famous Byron portrait that I had possibly studied in college when I was minoring in art history. (Naturally I didn’t mention this to the dealer, and managed to negotiate a reasonable price for the ambrotype.)

So when I got home with the cased photograph, I started googling portraits of Lord Byron to see which painter had painted “my” image…I quickly learned that the most famous portrait of Byron, painted in 1814, was by Thomas Phillips. It’s the one in the second row above. He also painted the portrait of Byron in Albanian dress, in the third row.

Other images of Byron are in the row below. Most of them were done during Byron’s lifetime (1788 – 1824) --- or shortly after.

Lord Byron was, of course, sort of a rock star in his day. He created the idea of the troubled and troublesome Byronic hero. Lady Caroline Lamb famously called him “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Mothers of young ladies of London wouldn’t even let their daughters look at him because he was so notorious for seducing every woman who crossed his path – including his half sister — and then dumping them, causing heartache and madness. He liked young boys too.

Lord Byron clinched his fame by dying tragically in Missolonghi, Greece in 1824 as he was fighting (and donating his large fortune) to help the Greek people achieve independence from the Turkish occupation. (Today, March 25, is Greece's Independence Day. They finally succeeded in tossing out the Turks after 400 years. Zito Hellas!)

As the most famous Philhellene, Lord Byron is beloved in Greece. Streets and baby boys are named after him, and whenever I’m in the center of Athens I pass a large statue of the dying Byron, clasped in the arms of a woman representing Hellas -- Greece. When Byron died of the flu (and the lousy medical treatment by his doctors—especially the bloodletting) he was only 36 years old.

But the more I searched, the more surprised I was to see that --while the face of Byron in paintings and drawings was almost identical to that in my ambrotype, none of the portraits I found was identical. The flowing lacy collar of his open shirt and the hairline -- the way his curls fell on his forehead --were always different from the version I have. (But the way his hair is receding at the temples remains consistent in all.)

This led me to wonder if by any chance my ambrotype was a record of a “lost” oil portrait of Byron by some famous nineteenth century artist?? The ambrotype photographic process (the second kind of photography after daguerreotypes) was introduced in 1854, peaked in 1857-59 and waned in 1861 when the more convenient and inexpensive tintype became popular.

So my ambrotype of a Byron portrait was probably made around 1857. The painting really resembles the Phillips portrait and could even possibly be another portrait of Byron by the same hand??

If it really is a lost portrait, of course, it makes the ambrotype I bought more valuable.

You can see in my scan that there is a frame around the painting that was photographed. If this is a frame to the oil painting, it could help identify the original. On the other hand, it could be the metal preserver on another ambrotype or daguerreotype — which would make my image a “copy image” and therefore less valuable.

An ambrotype is a negative image on glass that becomes a positive image when you put a dark background behind it. Every daguerreotype and ambrotype is one-of-a-kind…and reversed — a mirror image of the sitter. The only way to make a copy of a dag or an ambro was just to photograph the image all over again—and that comes out less sharp.

I hope to solve the mystery of my “lost Portrait of Byron” by sending these scans to both the Byron Society of America and to the newsletter of the Daguerreian Society, of which I am a member.

In the end, I may find out that my “lost” Byron portrait is in fact a well-known image that everyone else can identify. And that’s okay, because I’m still delighted to have the striking image of a beautiful painting of one of our most famous poets.

If anyone has any info on this subject – please let me know at joanpgage@yahoo.com

Historic Photo of My New England Village

New England is dotted with picturesque villages, each with its own Common or Village Green surrounded by white church spires, an ornate town hall and imposing Colonial and Victorian mansions. Every Yankee will argue that his own village is the prettiest and most historic.

I want to nominate MY village of Grafton MA , which is celebrating its 275th anniversary in 2010, and to share with you what may be one of the earliest photographs taken of the Grafton Common.

But first some of Grafton’s history:

*Grafton, incorporated in 1735, was originally called “Hassanamesit”, a Native American word meaning “place of small stones.”

*Four acres were set aside as common land in 1728. The present town Common is so typical of New England that MGM filmed parts of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah Wilderness there in 1935. MGM built the bandstand on the spot where Grafton’s first meeting house stood. It has become the town’s trademark. The Common holds a big Independence Day concert annually and the Bandstand is the site for prom and wedding photos and festivals year ‘round.

*In the 1800’s Grafton became a national leader in leather tanning and currying and in boot and shoe production, specializing in work boots for slave use in the South. By 1866 there were 10 boot-making shops, two tanneries and several other leather goods establishments around the Common.

*In 1806 Jonathan Wheeler built the Wheeler block, which still houses the Grafton Country Store and other businesses.

*The Congregational Church at the west side of the common has steeple and gallery clocks made by the Willard family, the famed Grafton clock makers. Their original house and clock factory is now a museum, a few miles north of the Common.

*Shoe manufacturer Samuel Wood built the Grafton Inn, the oldest structure on the Common, in 1805 at the intersection of key stagecoach routes from Boston to Hartford and from Providence to Worcester.

Last week the Grafton News, our small weekly newspaper, stated: “As part of this yearlong celebration, the Grafton News is compiling a virtual scrapbook of the town’s history at www.grafton275.org….If you have a historic tidbits or photos that you would like to share, please email them to us.”

Just last year I acquired a wonderful cased image-- an ambrotype of the Grafton Inn, which has functioned as an inn on the Common for its entire 205 years. It’s one of the favorite images in my collection of antique photos. So I scanned it (above) and e-mailed it to the editor with the following letter.

Dear Grafton News,

I am attaching two views of what probably may be the earliest photograph of Grafton you receive.

It’s an ambrotype of the Grafton Inn. Ambrotypes were introduced in 1854 and were popular until 1861. An ambrotype is a negative image produced on a glass plate which becomes positive with the addition of black backing.

(The first kind of photograph, introduced in 1839, is a daguerreotype –an image produced on a silver-coated copper plate. Both daguerreotypes and ambrotypes must be protected by a piece of glass and then a brass mat and then they are kept in a case which opens like a book.)

This is a 1/6 plate ambrotype, which means it is about 2.5 by 3 inches in size. It has black paint behind the image and the paint is damaged. I am attaching one view of the image with the protective mat and one in which I took away the mat so you can see more of the scene. Clearly the image needs cleaning and restoration but I am not expert enough to do this.

This image of the Inn could date from anytime between 1854 and 1861. If you look carefully you can see the figure of a little boy holding the horse and carriage (while the owner of the carriage, inside, is probably taking some refreshment.) There is also a figure in white clothing in the side door, watching the boy. I think it may be a woman with a white apron.

The editor of the Grafton News, Don Clark, wrote back the same day that he intends to publish it both in the newspaper and on the website. So I thought I’d give a sneak preview to the readers of ”ARollingCrone”.

The color photo above is one I took a few years ago, showing the Inn and the Bandstand as they look today.

Tell Me About These Civil War Soldiers

I’ve been collecting antique photo images for about 15 years, especially daguerreotypes (the first photographic process, revealed by Daguerre in 1839). Also ambrotypes, tintypes, CDV’s (cartes de visite) and Cabinet cards. My favorites are the cased images (housed in leather or gutta percha cases for their protection). Best and earliest of all are the dags.

Last Monday I went to Elizabeth’s Auctions in Auburn, MA, which regularly has sales of ephemera – books, advertising, newspapers, maps, posters, photographs – everything that is ephemeral. There were some cased images there which I bid on, including this super quarter-plate (about 4 by 3 inches) image in a leather case.

I call this a tintype but it’s also called a ferrotype. Daguerreotypes are photographic images on a copper plate which has been coated in silver. Ambrotypes are negative images on glass which turn into a positive image when you put something black—cloth, paper or painted metal—behind them.

About the time the Civil War was starting, tintypes became very popular because they didn’t need to be protected behind glass in a case (although this one is.) They were usually CDV- size (like a business card). A soldier going off to war could go to a studio, get his tintype image taken, and mail it to his loved ones or he could carry a tintype of his sweetheart in his pocket—unlike the bulkier and more fragile cased images.

When I opened this case at the auction I said “WOW!” The rarest things to find in an antique photograph are: a CW soldier, a gold miner with his gear, an animal (hard to get them to sit still for a photo) or, best of all Abe Lincoln—in a dag, ambro or tintype. (If you’ve got one of those, e-mail me immediately at joanpgage@yahoo.com. Also Edgar Allan Poe or any other recognizable famous person whose image is very rare. Lincoln gave out tiny tintypes for his campaign photos—those go for big money too.)

Anyway, I said “Wow!” because this image had not only one civil war soldier but TWO, and they were each holding a rifle! And the rifles have bayonets! (You get extra points for all this.) On the negative side, there is some kind of blur or bend on the image below their waists, and the case itself has come apart on the spine, but this is very common.

These two soldiers, in their new uniforms, with their new guns, went to a photographer’s studio to have this image taken as a kind of farewell. If you look, you can see the bases of the posing stands which are bracing their heads so that they won’t move while the photo is being taken. Afterward, the photographer tinted their cheeks pink and tinted their brass buttons, belt buckles, etc. with gold paint.

Collectors of Civil War images are usually men, and they are very specialized and knowledgeable. If they have an image of a soldier and also his name, they can tell you where he fought, when he died, what unit he was in, etc.

I, on the other hand, am very ignorant about Civil War images –I know the hats are called kepis, and that’s about all.

So I’m asking you Civil War experts if you can tell me more about these two handsome soldiers, after looking at their image.

Before the auction, a young man looked at this image after I did, and when he opened it he, too, said “Wow! The only thing missing is if they were holding up name tags.”

Often if you take an image out of the case you will find an identification (or even a lock of hair) hidden behind the image—but not on this one.

I thought I wouldn’t have a chance at winning this great photograph but I did—I guess none of my Civil War collector pals was there last Monday. Now I’m really curious to find out more about these two handsome young men going off to war.