San Francisco

Unknown

ca. 1850 · Daguerreotype · Photographs

Until recently, this daguerreotype was attributed to Alfred Sands Southworth (1811-1894), a partner in the Boston-based photography firm Southworth and Hawes, who headed west in 1849 with dreams of finding his fortune in gold. Recent scholarship, however, suggests that Southworth left his camera behind when he set out from Boston and that he purchased this photograph in San Francisco in 1849 or 1850. A number of daguerreotypists in the San Francisco area in the early 1850s made photographic views to compete with the lithographic "bird's-eye" views of the booming gold-rush city.

Artist

Unknown

Date

ca. 1850

Medium

Daguerreotype

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937