1851
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
A Bride and Her Bridesmaids is a 1851 by Josiah Johnson Hawes, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a small, shiny circle—about the size of a coffee coaster—showing a bride in white lace and her bridesmaids in matching dresses. This isn’t a painting; it’s one of the first photographs ever made in America. The men who took it built Boston’s first skylight studio and figured out how to make the metal plates extra bright. The faces look crisp, like they were cut from a magazine today. Look up the technique called daguerreotype next.
Southworth, a druggist, and Hawes, a carpenter and self-taught painter, operated a daguerreotype studio together in Boston that served the city’s elite. Masters of the aesthetic and technical aspects of the medium, they built the first skylight in Boston to supply a clear, strong light in their studio. Another of their innovations was the addition of an extra layer of silver to their plates to enhance the luminosity and level of polish of their daguerreotypes. This medallion portrait is an example of the most difficult and expensive portrait mode of the 1850s. A daguerreotype plate was first…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808–1901) was a photographer in Boston, Massachusetts. He and Albert Southworth established the photography studio of Southworth & Hawes, which produced numerous portraits of exceptional quality in the 1840s–1860s.
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