Thom's Family Gathering

All we know is marked in pencil on the back of this large cabinet photograph: a family named Thom who lived on the hill (?) perhaps somewhere in Connecticut. It is likely a multi-generation family event on the farm in the mid 1890s. A substantial house with painted finish on windows, doors and trim but with the clapboard unpainted and weathered dark, the lawn not manicured or planted as it might have been were it in town.

A deliveryman has arrived, but what sort of product would a farmer need to have brought in I have no idea. We see typical day dress for the period, certainly for such a get together. Of 17 people, I am amused to note that only three appear to be looking at the camera, not at all typical of the sort of focus you might expect if a professional photographer had been summoned for the occasion, so maybe someone in the family is manning the camera. Many hundreds of thousands of this sort of photo have been taken in every part of the world in 170 years, and so many are still with us today.

Electric Ride

Once again, indulge my fascination with streetcars: the Woodland Heights trollies of the Springfield Traction Company that took over services in Springfield, Missouri in 1895. Had I lived in an era when streetcars were ubiquitous, no doubt my romantic notions would be tempered by the reality that they were dirty, noisy and uncomfortable, only preferable to shank's mare if you had a way to go, but they sure do look cute in miniature running around my Christmas tree dinging merrily! Certainly, in my own time, smelly diesel city buses were hardly my idea of the way to go, but you get the idea – time and distance trump reality.

Seeing Gotham

Touring New York City in style in the early years of the 20th century! An open vehicle with solid rubber tires was acceptable to folk who for at least two generations paraded about in horse drawn open carriages and barouches and felt very good about themselves indeed (tourists today pay exorbitant prices to do so in Central Park!) This tour bus, not much more than a truck fitted with seats, was small compared with others of this kind that were easily three times this length and carried perhaps as many as 42 passengers.

Today we would want cushier seats with safety belts, an enclosure with conditioned air and large windows, and the driver would need to be amplified so we could hear the canned script – we could not be expected to be ferried about in the equivalent of a delivery truck or depot hack, but I am sure these tourists were content to pay the fare to satisfy their curiosity about life in Gotham. A very good time was had by all!

Quintessential Victorian

My title expresses my opinion that this is a prime example of the best CDVs of the Victorian photographers. The convention of composing a head-and-shoulders portrait with the face near the center is typical; today we would tend not to have so much blank background above the head and hat.

This 1880s image is as charming as they come. A very attractive young woman, quite well dressed without any pretensions to being a fashion plate – she is the subject, not her clothes, yet she has a certain flair with the tiny ruffled edge to her standing collar and pin offset by the informality of the way she has tied the velvet ribbon around her throat. Women's styles of the time often interpreted the dress of a country maid in a high style fashion, but it worked very well when it was not too extreme.

Another thing that attracted me to this portrait is that the young woman makes me think of the models that the French Impressionist artist Auguste Renoir painted during this same period. One always wonders whether an artist paints an image true to a particular model who sits for him or if he paints an ideal based on what he sees before him (some of the Pre-Raphaelite painters' models are very well documented in photographs – perhaps because they had a propensity for marrying them – so we know they were often guilty of painting to a particular ideal), but here I see a face that Renoir might well have painted. This image looks like the portraits he painted that are famed for their naturalism and the certainty that you are looking at an identifiable person and true likeness; this young woman's no-nonsense persona leads you to suspect that she would never have countenanced being the subject in one of his nude bathers scenes for which he is also quite famous.

Four Sisters, 1922

This 1922 portrait of three sisters from a Massachusetts studio had great promise: a painted backdrop superior to what one often sees, the furniture made to seem a part of it rather than stuck in front of it; good natural lighting; but perhaps the stage managing of the subjects accounts for the lack of success in getting pleasant expressions – all but the baby are somewhat wan and unengaged. As I have noted before, the personalities of the children have much more to do with the outcome than the talents of the photographer, in fact I would imagine that this same photographer had used this setting with other children who responded very well and the results were likely very satisfying. As it is, the best little face is the baby who looks almost more like a painting than a photograph.

Kudos to the photographer who had everything right that was within his control! He cared about his work – he signed and dated it right in the image.