| Names: | | | Dates: | 1810 - 1880, 24 July | | Born: | US, CT, Wethersfield | | Died: | US, PA, Philadelphia | | Active: | US |
American Daguerreotypist. There is a detailed biography at Craig‘s Daguerreian Registry (www.daguerreotype.com).
Samuel Broadbent (1810-1880) began his career as a portrait painter and miniaturist in Hartford, Connecticut while in his teens, following in the footsteps of his father who was an artist as well as a physician. Friend and distant relative Samuel Morse introduced Broadbent to daguerreotyping in 1840 and throughout the 1840s Broadbent traveled around the southern United States as an itinerant daguerreotypist visiting many of the same locations where he had worked as a portrait painter and miniaturist. He is known to have had daguerreotype studios in different cities in Georgia; North and South Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; and Wilmington, Delaware before settling in Philadelphia in 1851 where he worked for the next nearly thirty years. Broadbent never completely gave up portrait painting, however, and his portrait of Philadelphia artist Thomas Sully was exhibited in 1869 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Working primarily as a portrait photographer for almost four decades, Broadbent entered into a number of different partnerships, including with female daguerreotypist Sally [Sarah] Garrett Hewes, Henry C. Phillips, William Curtis Taylor, and fellow painter Frederick A. Wenderoth. He worked in a variety of photographic mediums and produced images utilizing a number of different processes. His daguerreotypes frequently employed a painted landscape background or centered the sitter within a window frame adorned with large leafy vines along one side. In addition to daguerreotypes, the Broadbent studio also produced ambrotypes and tintypes and successfully made the transition to paper photography. After Samuel Broadbent’s death in 1880, two of his sons continued his photography business until 1905. A Broadbent photography studio remained in Philadelphia until 1920.
[Sarah J. Weatherwax, Curator of Prints and Photographs, The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107]
(pers. email, Sarah Weatherwax to Alan Griffiths, 29 June 2013)
Stereographs project
Business locations
Wilmington, DE, US
Philadelphia, PA, US
[5-8] *[Samuel Broadbent] Stereos under this imprint rare. Said to have worked "in the
south" early in life as painter; learned dag.
techniques from S.F.B. Morse; came to Wilmington
49 & worked initially in dags, ambros &
ivorytypes including some in stereo format in
both dags & ambros. Moved to Phila. 51 & set
up own studio at 36 Chestnut St., exhibited at
Inst. of American Manufactures 51-2. By 57 was
at 136 Chestnut, at 428 Chestnut in 58, 814
Chestnut 59-61 as "Broadbent & Co." Drops from
sight until 70 when he surfaces in partnership
with Henry C. Phillips until 74, then in
partnership with W.C. Taylor 75-82, both in
Phila. Active in Phila. Photographic Society.
B. Wethersfield, CT 10, D. 80 or 81.
T.K. Treadwell & William C. Darrah (Compiled by), Wolfgang, Sell (Updated by), 11/28/2003, Photographers of the United States of America, (National Stereoscopic Association) |
| Credit: National Stereoscopic Association with corrections and additions by Alan Griffiths and others. |
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Preparing biographies
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