Archive for the '05 - Carte-de-Visite' Category
Mrs. Charles Dean photo
Today’s picture is a CDV showing a young woman with a high collar. She is framed inside an oval, typically an 1870s feature, and outside the oval is filled in with a leafy pattern. This photo has an inscribed date and identification, as well as a photographer’s imprint.
The photographer imprint reads:
Raimheld & Graham
Photographers,
Lyons, Ia.
The inscription […]
Matthew W Budlong picture analysis
Ok, so there haven’t been any posts here in a long time. Takes too long to assemble one of those analyses, so we are changing track (again). From now on I will post one image and look at how we can determine the date, identity of the sitter, and identity of the photographer — in […]
Read More..>>The Tasseled Frame
William Culp Darrah, in his 1981 publication Cartes de Visite in Ninteenth Century Photography, describes ornate oval frames around the image, either printed or embossed on the card, and dates them to the 1863-68 range. In fact, the use of oval or sometimes arch-topped rectangles, especially with tintype images, continued through the 1870s and into […]
Read More..>>Single Border Line
If you read these posts regularly, you will remember that in an earlier post on the double line border I stated that:
We are restricting our research to the double line because a single line continued to be used sporadically for as long as CDVs and Cabinet Cards were produced.
Well now I will have to eat […]
Glossy Dark Card Fronts
Chocolate Brown, Dark Green and Black
The cards we describe in this article have dark card faces, typically a dark chocolate brown, or very dark green, or even black. There were cards with black fronts both before and after the period we describe, but they tended to be mat-surfaced, like regular writing paper. The cards we […]
Lengthwise Imprints
On card mounted photographs, we see the photographer’s imprint on front, on back, or both. When the imprint is on the back, it can be oriented the way most portraits are, with the ‘upright’ dimension the longer one, or it can be oriented parallel to the long side, like a typical business card. It is […]
Read More..>>Cameo and Pseudo-Cameo
Presenting photographic images in an oval shape was popular from the beginning of photography. In our dated image collection, about 40% of all cased images have oval mats. Since more elaborate shapes became available as time went on, one would think the simple oval would lose popularity — but in fact it was just the […]
Read More..>>The Double Line
Usually characterized as an 1860s feature (though we found several instances from the early 1870s), the double line around the print area of a CDV is most often gilt, but may be colored ink. Here is what Darrah had to say about this feature in his Cartes de Visite book:
By mid 1861 a variety of […]
Notched Sides
Notches along the sides of card mounted photographs are mostly a characteristic of Cabinet Cards, though a few CDVs, some of the late square and nearly square formats also have notches. Compared to cards of the same age in general, the notched cards seem to have square corners more frequently, though notched cards with rounded […]
Read More..>>Bilateral Ovoid
I will use Darrah’s term for this type of CDV back — bilateral ovoid, though the term is not very accurate. The figure is bilateral — in fact it is bilateral in two directions, both left-right and upper-lower. But calling it an ovoid is a stretch. Since it doubly bilateral it seems quadrilateral should apply, […]
Read More..>>