Figure 1 – Copy of an 1840 daguerreotype by John William Draper of his daughter Dorothy Catherine Draper, the earliest extant portrait of a woman. In the public domain because of its age.

By now you will have realized that there is nothing that I love better than digging into the photographic past and looking at the faces of the first half of the nineteenth century – so distant yet so close! It is both the familiarity of the people as it is the early photographers applying for the first time the conventions of classical art to this new medium.  It is significant also that we have an incomplete record. It may be known that there is an earlier example, but that is lost to us. Yet there is always the possibility that it will suddenly reappear.

Such is the case when it comes to the earliest example of a portrait of a woman.  Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791–1872) said in 1855 that he had taken full-length portrait daguerreotypes of his daughter as early as September and October 1839. But these have not survived.

So for the earliest remaining example we have to turn to Figure 1 which is a striking portrait by John William Draper (1811–82), professor of chemistry at the New York University of his daughter Dorothy Catherine Draper (1807–1901),  The image is of a copy.  The original now in the Spencer Museum of Art, in Lawrence, Kansas was taken in 1840.

We are struck by the beauty of this image and by the beauty of this young woman of the early nineteenth century. She is a flower captive of her clothes, which perhaps aided her in holding still for the excruciatingly long exposure.

Several years ago I went to visit the Women’s Suffrage Museum in Seneca Falls, NY.  The first Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, NY on July 19-20,1848; so thd the start of the American Suffrage Movement was contemporary with this photograph, and I was struck by the statement that the first step in the liberation of women was freeing them from the confines of their clothing. You have to be able to move, before you can move freely.