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Southworth & Hawes
Classroom in the Emerson School for Girls
1850 (ca)
Daguerreotype
21.6 x 16.5 cm (8 1/2 x 6 1/2 ins)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937, Accession Number: 37.14.22
LL/40616
Comments from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Daguerreotypy, the first photographic process, spread around the world after its inventor Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) presented it to the public in 1839. Exposed in a camera obscura and developed in mercury vapors, each highly polished silvered-copper plate is a unique photograph that exhibits extraordinary detail and three-dimensionality when viewed in proper light.
While the Boston partnership of Southworth and Hawes produced the finest portrait daguerreotypes in America for a clientele that included leading political, intellectual, and artistic figures, the firm also made a limited number of exterior and interior views outside their controlled studio setting. This daguerreotype shows the most prominent school for young women in Boston, established in 1823 by George Barrell Emerson, second cousin of the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.
George Barrell Emerson (1797-1881), Wikipedia
(Accessed: 12 November 2020)
Born in Kennebunk, Maine. He graduated from Harvard College in 1817, and soon after took charge of an academy in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Between 1819 and 1821, he was the tutor in mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard, and in 1821 was chosen principal of The English High School for Boys in Boston. In 1823 he opened a private school for girls in the same city, which he conducted until 1855, when he retired from professional life. He was for many years president of the Boston Society of Natural History, and was appointed by Governor Everett chairman of the commissioners for the zoological and botanical survey of Massachusetts.[1] He died in Newton, Massachusetts.
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