(PHOTOGRAPHY) Ambrotype of “a freed slave girl brought north

Sale 2663 - Lot 334

Price Realized: $ 5,750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000

(PHOTOGRAPHY.) Ambrotype of "a freed slave girl brought north by B. S. DeForest," with two supporting family photos. Ninth-plate ambrotype, 2½ x 2 inches, in period case; image embellished in shawl and gloves, top of case detached, with two later pencil caption notes laid in with identical text. No place, circa 1865

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Additional Details

This photograph depicts a young African-American woman in a shawl. It was found among family papers of Albany, NY architect Bartholomew Schermerhorn DeForest (1823-1886), who served as a lieutenant in the 81st New York Infantry during the Civil War. They fought in several battles including Cold Harbor, VA before participating in the Siege of Petersburg from June 1864 onward. He was discharged due to disability in September 1864, and was later an architect in Cleveland, OH from 1876 until his death.

This young woman apparently did not remain with the DeForest family after coming north. His 1866 war memoir, "Random Sketches and Wandering Thoughts," does not mention bringing a freed girl north with him, nor does one appear with the family in the 1865 or 1880 census.

With--two other DeForest family cased images: a sixth-plate tintype of Lieutenant DeForest in uniform (no caption); and two half-plate ambrotypes facing each other in a double case, with a later caption slip identifying the family portrait to right as DeForest with his wife Elizabeth and daughter Irene in 1857. They are accompanied by a typescript partial estate inventory of the family's "bookcase curio cabinet," describing the "daguerreotype of Lt. B.S. DeForest, with broken hinges" and "Daguerreotype of a contraband colored girl."