?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
(URBAN STREET SCENE) A full-plate daguerreotype street scene featuring a staged tableau in which two enigmatic figures greet one another in a doorway. This detailed architectural study highlights two wooden-frame buildings flanking a 3-story brick house with a mini-temple-front entryway and a pair of overflowing planters containing delicately hand-tinted flowers; in a leather case. Mid-1850s
In this striking full-plate daguerreotype the compact architectural space associated with the urban environment is set into relief against an open public space of social interaction. On a very quiet, treeless street lined with diversely elegant buildings, two figures seem to lean towards each other on a porch, each of their faces obscured, both by the distance at which the photographer was positioned and by a parasol the woman in a full skirt carries. They may know each other; one may live or work in the building, but their ambiguous interaction hints at the unknown.
The image also features three beautiful buildings bathed in sunlight, each of them rivaling for attention, and asking the central question of the image: are they the real subject of the daguerreotype, or does the staged scene hint at something now lost in time? The building at the left, an example of a more elaborate wooden-frame home, shows a brick base, two porches, a pointed roof, and an artful bargeboard, while the house on the right is the most minimally constructed of the three, with a jigsaw-cut bargeboard at the top gable serving as the structure's only trim. The sun, coming from the left side of the image, casts delicate shadows on the wooden boards, and highlights the delicate work of the architectural style. The large modified Greek Revival building in the center has a flat brick front and brownstone trimmings around the door and windows. The small porch is decorated with two plants, each with delicate spots of red and green hand coloring.
This handsome daguerreotype is reproduced in John Wood's The Daguerreotype: A Sesquicentennial Celebration, where he notes that the signage on the right and left buildings are legible as the office of Dr. H.B. May, the shop of J. Wood (a butcher), and a builder whose sign can be partially read. The rare full-plate was then in the Collection of Julian Wolff.
The deft composition, masterful handling of detail, and inclusion of figures in this remarkable piece indicate that it was made by a skilled photographer. The owner of this piece purchased it with the understanding that it depicted Brooklyn, and the New York architectural historian Francis Morrone has posited that it may depict a street scene in Greenpoint, Brooklyn based on fire laws of the period (which prohibited new wooden house construction), the fringed or scalloped valances which were fashionable when wooden houses were being built in Greenpoint, and the appearance of the Greek Revival house.
