Tag: unidentified

Adorable Moppets 2.0

The second of an occasional series.

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Baby in a barnyard feeding chickens. Glass-plate image, circa 1900. Photo courtesy Price and Zimmer Collection.
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Boy in checkered suit. Tintype, circa 1870. Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.
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Boy standing on chair. Tintype, circa 1862. Courtesy Price and Zimmer Collection.
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A doll with a doll. Paper print, circa 1920. Courtesy Jack and Beverly Wilgus Collection.
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Misses Unimpressed and Fuhgetaboudit. Albumen cabinet card, circa 1875. Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.

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As They Were

“Yet in these ears, till hearing dies,
One set slow bell will seem to toll
The passing of the sweetest soul
That ever look’d with human eyes.”—Alfred Lord Tennyson

 

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Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection

This poignant American brooch, which measures about 1.75 inches tall and dates to the late 1860s, contains a tintype image of a boy of about eight years wearing a wool jacket. Around the inner rim of the viewing compartment is a thin braid of blond hair, presumably that of the child in the photograph.

The brooch has a unique swivel mechanism that I have never seen before. Usually, the brooch body revolves to bring to the front a second viewing compartment (in this case the back side contains only checkered silk). On this brooch, however, it is the pin mechanism that rolls to whichever side will serve as the reverse.

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Courtesy Jack and Beverly Wilgus Collection.

This lovely American woman, who is pictured in fashions of about 1850, once looked out at those who loved her from the black enamel setting of this mourning brooch just as she now studies us, the denizens of an age perhaps unimaginable to her. The daguerreotype is delicately tinted to give her cheeks the rosiness of life and to highlight her gold brooch and earrings.

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Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.

This large rolled gold brooch contains a ruby ambrotype (an ambrotype made on red glass) of a beautiful English woman whose first name, Emily, is inscribed on the reverse. It dates to about the same year as Beverly Wilgus’s brooch, above. Ω

 

Historical Hotties or “My Imaginary Dead Boyfriends”

The first of an occasional series.

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Hoo Boy! 1/6th-plate daguerreotype with tinting and solarization, circa 1846. Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.
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Fresh from the cornfield, tintype, circa 1885. Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.
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Ol’ Blue Eyes, 1/6th-plate, hand-tinted daguerreotype, circa 1852. Ann Longmore-Etheridge Collection.
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Handsome fellow, 1/6th-plate Weston daguerreotype with solarization, circa 1852. James P. Weston operated a daguerreotype gallery in New York City between 1842 and 1857. The studio functioned out of 132 Chatham Street from 1852 to 1856.

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