AN INTIMATE MASTERWORK BY SOUTHWORTH & HAWES SHOWING ONE OF HAWES’ DAUGHTERS

Provenance: The Southworth & Hawes Studio, Boston; thence by descent to Edward Southworth Hawes, Boston; likely Holman’s Print Shop, Boston, early 1940s; David Feigenbaum Collection, Boston; sold in The David Feigenbaum Collection of Southworth & Hawes and Other 19th-Century Photographs, Sotheby’s, New York, 27 April 1999, lot 32 (group lot); Maillet Daguerreotype Collection, Christie’s; present owner.

An important ca. 1845 daguerreotype with exceptional provenance traditionally attributed as depicting one of Josiah Johnson Hawes’s daughters. As such, it belongs to the intimate inner circle of America’s most celebrated early photographic partnership. A superb portrait, it shows the child seated in a spindle-back “Jenny Lind” chair, turned in graceful three-quarter view and gazing just beyond the camera, perhaps toward a parent nearby. The sitter wears an off-the-shoulder pleated dress trimmed with dark ribbon, characteristic of fashionable mid-Victorian children’s attire.

The image carries unusual significance not only for its tenderness and beauty, but for its authorship. Southworth & Hawes stand among the undisputed masters of American daguerreian portraiture, renowned for their technical brilliance, artistic sensitivity, and distinguished Boston clientele. Their portraits of statesmen, reformers, intellectuals, and family members alike helped define the highest achievements of the medium in its earliest decades. That this photograph portrays one of Hawes’s own children places it within the small and especially desirable body of works connected directly to the lives of the makers themselves. The child’s expression, one of soft curiosity and calm attentiveness, is rendered with exceptional delicacy, and the clarity of the eyes and wispy texture of the hair testify to the extraordinary control for which the Southworth & Hawes studio was justly famous.

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The image remains bright with strong contrast. There is minor peripheral tarnishing close the edges of the brass mat, which is typical.