[Students from the Emerson School for Girls]

Albert Sands Southworth|Josiah Johnson Hawes|Southworth and Hawes

ca. 1850 · Daguerreotype · Photographs

This first photographic process invented by Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) spread rapidly around the world after its presentation to the public in Paris in 1839. Exposed in a camera obscura and developed in mercury vapors, each highly polished silvered copper plate is a unique photograph that, viewed in proper light, exhibits extraordinary detail and three-dimensionality. The Boston partnership of Southworth and Hawes produced the finest portrait daguerreotypes in America for leading political, intellectual, and artistic figures. While at first glance, this group portrait of twenty-five unidentified young women may appear to be a haphazard confluence of bodies, the composition is carefully orchestrated as a series of diagonals and pyramids, as in the truncated pyramid formed by the eighteen seated and standing figures on the right-hand side of the picture.

Artist

Albert Sands Southworth|Josiah Johnson Hawes|Southworth and Hawes

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