Portraits from the first 100 years of photography
The portrait above is an ambrotype, or photograph on glass, by an unknown photographer. Ambrotypes were introduced in the United States in the early 1850s and remained popular for about a decade. They were simpler and less costly to produce than daguerreotypes. Eventually they were replaced by tintypes and albumen paper prints (such as the... Continue Reading →
This cabinet card portrait was made at a studio in the port city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The studio belonged to a man named John O'Neil. Google didn't turn up any information about Mr. O'Neil, so I looked at census records on Ancestry. In the 1880 U.S. Census, I found a John E. O'Neil, age... Continue Reading →
This undated cabinet card portrait was taken in the ancient shipping town of Gravesend, Kent, England. Gravesend is on the south bank of the Thames Estuary, about 21 miles (35 km) from central London. The photograph was taken at the studio of Frederick Charles Gould, who became known for images he captured of the many... Continue Reading →
The young man in this carte-de-visite portrait is wearing a military-style tunic with an "F" on the collar. The photograph was taken at the studio of Fredrique Holmstedt in Vadstena, Sweden. I had difficulty finding information online about Fredrique. Unable to read the handwritten dedication in Swedish in the upper left corner, I turned to... Continue Reading →
The young man in this small snapshot is wearing a military tunic with no insignia. He may have been serving as a musician in the Imperial Japanese Army. The photo is blank on the back, so it's hard to say when it was taken, but I'd guess it was printed in the 1930s. At the... Continue Reading →
This postcard was sent from Helsinki (Swedish: Helsingfors), the capital of Finland, to the Finnish port town of Hanko (Hangö) on February 16, 1915. At that time Finland was a Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire. Because Russia was engaged in the First World War, the card had to be cleared by a wartime government... Continue Reading →
I'm guessing they're siblings, but I can't say for sure. This early cabinet card photo came from a collection of musical ephemera in Boston, Massachusetts. (Two other posts featuring photos from the same collection are Music and baseball in the forest and "Waldfreunde" Mandolin Orchestra (1922).) Do their outfits suggest any particular place of origin? Despite... Continue Reading →
At the front of the group of people in this photograph are nine musicians. So it must have been a musical retreat in the woods. But wait, are the men in the second row holding baseball bats? Are the musicians and baseball players camping together? And who plays baseball in the woods, anyway? There's a... Continue Reading →
I found this carte-de-visite for sale in Massachusetts, which is the state with the second-highest number of Portuguese Americans (after California). Who was this elegant young woman, posing confidently at an instrument a century and a half ago? And what kind of instrument was it, exactly? It looks too narrow to be a piano, yet... Continue Reading →
This photo came from a collector of banjos and musical ephemera in Boston, Massachusetts. The names of the men in the photo are written on the back, along with the following inscription: Andenken an den Touristenverein Waldfreunde (Feuerbach) im Jahr 1922 This translates roughly to "Souvenir of the Waldfreunde touring group in the year 1922." ... Continue Reading →
This cabinet card was listed for sale in England without any information, and only after receiving it did I see "F DOWNER WATFORD" in the lower right corner of the image. Frederick Downer (1840-1919) was the first commercial photographer in Watford, which is 15 miles (24 km) northwest of central London. Mandolin ensembles and orchestras arose... Continue Reading →
This 19th-century photograph was printed on very thin paper and glued to a stiffer paper mount. At some point the mount was trimmed to the dimensions of a postcard, possibly so that it would fit into an album. The back is blank. I bought it from a dealer in Suffolk, England, who couldn't tell me... Continue Reading →
Tokens of Companionship 
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