Visual Materials
Cabinet photographs
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Cartes-de-visite (photographs)
Visual Materials
Approximately 5,000 cartes-de-visite and a few tintypes, almost all portraits. The carte-de-visite, or calling card photograph, is generally an albumen print mounted on cardstock, 4 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches. Some photographs are hand colored or have handwritten names written on the back. The binders contain about 200 to 250 photographs each.
photCL 581
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Carl Mautz collection of cartes-de-visite and cabinet photographs from the Western United States and Canada
Visual Materials
A collection of approximately 7,000 cartes-de-visite and cabinet photographs, almost entirely portraits of ordinary people in the American West, photographed between approximately 1860 and 1910. The photographs represent the work of thousands of commercial photographers operating in every state west of the Mississippi, plus Wisconsin, which the collector considered a western state given its frontier role in the migration of photographers from the East to West. The collection includes 23 states and territories, including Hawaii, and a few portraits from British Columbia and Western Canada. There are a relatively small number of photographs from Alaska (1) and Arizona (6), not due to scarcity, but because those parts of the collection were previously dispersed. Portraits taken in California make up about half of the collection, representing established photographers in big cities like San Francisco and Sacramento, as well as lesser-known photographers in sparsely populated mountain towns. The people of the frontier and post-frontier West posing in the portraits are mostly unidentified, though some images do have handwritten names and dates. The majority of people pictured are white, with a relatively small number of portraits of African American, Chinese, Latino, and Indigenous persons. Sitters are of all ages, seen in individual poses or in family groups, in various styles of clothing, hair, jewelry, props, and furniture. Images include soldiers, wedding portraits, mothers with babies, children, frontiersmen, workers with tools, dogs, and occasional outdoor images of buildings or people. This collection was amassed over 35 years and became the primary source material for Mautz's seminal reference work Biographies of Western Photographers (1997). The thousands of imprints, some elaborately illustrated, include the names of several female photographers, such as: Fannie Hoyt, Salt Lake City, Utah; Mrs. E. W. (Eliza) Withington, Ione City, California; and Mrs. C. Klostermann, Eureka, California.
photCL 581
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California: Far north cities and towns; Traveling photographers
Visual Materials
Contains portraits from Colusa, Red Bluff, Chico, Orland, Ukiah, Ferndale, Lakeport, Eureka, Mendocino City, Fort Jones, Weaverville, Hayden Hill, Crescent City, Alturas, Yreka, Downieville. Several portraits from the C.C. Richardson family album, Chico and Richardson Springs, California. This binder also has cartes-de-visite by traveling photographers, who worked in temporary set-up studios or sometimes worked on railroad cars, moving from town to town. One image shows a group portrait of four men at a table, one with an accordion.
photCL 581
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Iowa; Kansas; Minnesota; Missouri; Montana
Visual Materials
Portraits in Iowa include: a chemist measuring liquids in bottles; a man with two guns in his belt; an outdoor image of a small church with steeple in Williamsburg. Other portraits include: two individual portraits of African American men (Kansas); a minister with Salvation Army button and violin (Kansas); a baker displaying bread (Minnesota); a couple in front of a house with picket fence (Minnesota).
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Traveling photographers
Visual Materials
One portrait of three theater performers, including a clown (California); two men in boxing pose, with the interior walls of studio and roof skylight showing in photograph.
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Beecher family photograph collection
Visual Materials
A collection of five photographs of various Beecher family members in five different photographic formats: ambrotype, albumen print, carte-de-visite, cabinet photograph, and a hand-colored salted paper print. A portrait of Lyman Beecher produced by Mathew Brady in 1856 is a combination of watercolor, ink, and pencil added to the surface of a salted paper print. There are two variants of a Beecher family group portrait taken in 1859 depicting Lyman Beecher and nine of his adult children; one is a large albumen print and the other an ambrotype. Also included are an autographed cabinet photograph of an older Harriet Beecher Stowe; and a hand-colored Augustus Morand print based on a miniature of a young Eunice White (Bullard) Beecher, author and wife of Henry Ward Beecher. This carte-de-visite portrait is within a Bullard family album containing 45 additional cartes-de-visite and cabinet photographs. Only a few portraits in the album are identified, including some cousins of Eunice Bullard.
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