Portrait of a Young Man
1855
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1855
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Portrait of a Young Man is a 1855 by Unknown, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a young man in a dark suit, staring straight at you from a small, oval portrait. His hair is neatly combed, and his expression is serious but calm. This isn’t a painting—it’s an early photograph, one of the first ways regular people could afford a picture of themselves. The case is fancy, made to look like carved wood, but it’s actually molded plastic. It was meant to sit on a shelf or be carried like a keepsake. If you like how everyday people preserved their faces, look up *america* for more early photographs.
It seemed a miracle that anyone could afford to have an accurate record of their own likeness or those of their loved ones. This portrait is an excellent example of the hundreds of thousands of portraits produced by commercial photographers in mid-nineteenth-century America. Small scale yet housed in an elaborately decorated thermoplastic case, it was intended to be carried by its owner or displayed on parlor tables or knickknack shelves.
During the first decades of photography, portraits far outnumbered every other type of image.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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