Sep 28, 2023 - Sale 2646

Sale 2646 - Lot 234

Price Realized: $ 2,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
(PHOTOGRAPHY.) Wide-ranging album including Frederick Douglass, views of the 1876 Philadelphia fair, and much more. 202 photographs mounted directly onto 22 album leaves. Large 4to, 13 1/4 x 10 1/2 inches, original tooled gilt morocco, worn, detached from text block; generally minor wear to contents. With later partial typescript inventory of the portraits. No place, bulk circa 1870-1885, one dated 1903
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Additional Details

This wide-ranging album is arranged into several sections. It begins with 20 city architectural views, most unidentified, including the White House and Capitol, a 13-inch panoramic view of the Cleveland Viaduct by Sweeney, and several shots of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. They are followed by 51 images of sculpture, some with exhibition labels from the 1876 Philadelphia exposition such as Pietro Guarnerio's "Vanity."

Next comes a selection of 57 cabinet-sized and 21 carte-de-visite-sized portraits, mostly actors, authors, abolitionists, and political figures, most of them American, almost all identified in pencil or with typed captions. One cabinet-sized shot of Frederick Douglass has been identified as a lesser-known circa 1879 portrait by Boston photographer George Kendall Warren (Stauffer 97). Other important cabinet-sized portraits include Cornelius Vanderbilt; Edwin Booth; Bronson Alcott (found to be a George Kendall Warren shot from circa 1872); Henry W. Longfellow; Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton seated together at a table (found to be a Napoleon Sarony photograph from circa 1870); Julia Ward Howe; Ralph Waldo Emerson (signed in the negative by George Kendall Warren, 1870); William Lloyd Garrison; a well-known early shot of Thomas Edison with his recording apparatus; and Louisa May Alcott.

The album closes with 53 quite miscellaneous images. Most notable are a montage of 3 images from President Garfield's funeral obsequies in Cleveland, 1881; 3 views of New Orleans; and a photograph of A.M. Willard's painting "Spirit of '76."