Prints, photographs, and architectural records

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2005 by Sandra Markham

The New-York Historical Society's Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections is more familiarly known as the print room. Its holdings in every way complement those in the museum (art and artifacts) and the library (books, serials, maps, and manuscripts). Like the other curatorial departments of the society, the print room has individual works of historic importance, archival material, and discrete collections formed by collectors. It is regularly mined by researchers for the compelling prints and photographs they need to illustrate stories about New York and New Yorkers, as well as much of the rest of the country and many parts of the world. Like the museum and library collections, the society's prints, photographs, and architectural records are more a reflection of the diverse activities and interests of New Yorkers than necessarily the history of New York City and State or any one place: in conjunction, they provide a visual who, what, and where of American history and civilization.

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The first printed catalogue of the society's collection was issued in 1813. (1) An appendix to that publication contained an inventory of thirty "views" and more than fifty "portraits" held by the society, all of them prints. The views included several pictures engraved by Cornelius Tiebout (c. 1773-1832), along with other small format works most likely taken from books and serials. Half the subjects were buildings, bridges, gardens, and scenes in New York City, with the remainder split almost equally among New York State, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and London. Portraits included "several different engravings" of both Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, and a selection of other familiar faces of colonial times: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Robert R. Livingston, Thomas Paine, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin West, engraved after paintings by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, George Romney, Gilbert Stuart, and Thomas Sully. (2) All of the prints listed are still in the print room, now accompanied by more than two million images of the same and similar subjects acquired over the past two centuries.

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Portraits are a particular strength of the print room, both in prints and photographs, and form a comprehensive overview of who, from the sixteenth into the twenty-first century. One group of prints mentioned in the 1813 catalogue is still one of the collection's treasures today: the only complete set of profile portraits of New York State's elected officials in the year 1798. The fifty-seven French style stipple-engraved like-nesses include those of Governor John Jay (1745-1829), Lieutenant Governor Stephen Van Rensselaer (1764-1839), the speaker of the house, senators, and assemblymen. (3) Many other individuals of the eighteenth century are represented by engraved and mezzotint portraits, both foreign- and American-made, including several rare prints of members of North American Indian tribes (see Pl. IV).

The society has a number of large collections created and given by printmakers who specialized in portraits, among them Max and Albert Rosenthal of Philadelphia and Jacques Reich of New York City, as well as the work of noted New York photographers who excelled in that genre from the 1850s through the 1960s: Mathew B. Brady (c. 1823-1896), (4) the Pach Brothers firm, Burr McIntosh, Pirie MacDonald, Doris Ulmann, and the Jacobs Studio. (5) There are portrait photographs used by portrait painters, such as some 150 almost life-sized faces that were sources for the painter Daniel Huntington (1816-1906) and given to the society by his son in 1908. There are even photographic portraits of painted portraits, including one of the society's earliest acquisitions in that then-new medium, received in May 1857: a pair of salted-paper prints of watercolor miniatures of George and Martha Washington painted by Archibald Robertson (1765-1835), and photographed by Brady in April 1857. (6) There is also an abundance of photographic portraits of silhouette portraits, including nearly four thousand "shades" of Americans cut by Augustin Amant Constant Fidele Edouart (1789-1861) in the 1840s. These were photographed for their owner; Emily Jackson (Mrs. E. Nevill Jackson; 1861-1947). Edouart's biographer, before being sold individually in 1913.

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Other early formats of portrait photography are kept in the print room's general collections known as "files." The Cased Photograph File has more than two thousand images, more than half of which are daguerreotypes. Among them are intimate portraits of many icons of American cultural history including the painters Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand, the writer Washington Irving, the politician William Henry Seward, and the performer Jenny Lind. There are early cased images of hundreds of ordinary Americans; group portraits of families, friends, students, and domestic animals. Photographic portraits of nineteenth-century personalities include more than seven thousand miniatures dating from the early 1860s through the 1890s, which comprise the Carte de Visite Photograph File, with several hundred more stored in period photograph albums. (7)