Figure 1 – Napolean Sarong “Yound Couple c1870” gentleman. In the public domain by virtue of its age.

In researching Sunday’s blog about Napoleon Sarony I came across this beautiful set of “Imperial” photographs that he took around 1870. c1870 is my conclusion both because of the photographer’s Broadway address and because of the lady’s dress – somewhere between 1870 and 1877. The hoop in the rear with bundles of fabric was characteristic. To me the appeal of these unknown, to us, individuals exceeds in a way similar images of celebrities of the day.

What is so wonderful to my mind is Sarony’s skill at drawing out his subjects. He worked with an assistant who controlled the bulb and would sing, dance, hoot, and make animal noises to get the subject to give him an appealing pose.  Then he would signal the assistant to take the image.

What I see in the faces of this couple (I would venture that they were married at the time because if you take a magnifying loop to the original you see just a glimpse of a gold band on the ring finger of the lady’s left hand. You can in fact see this in the scanned image.) is what is referred to today, as a deep sense of American exceptionalism.  This couple is out to conquer the world. They are young. They are Americans at a point in history when everything was possible. The man stands in a forceful commanding posture his gloved hands slightly clinched as if he is prepared to take us on. And the lady, with her elegant earrings and appealing eyes, has the most magnificent “Mona Lisa” smile. These images are Sarony at his best, at the height of the portraitist’s art.

* I have scanned these images from the original and with the exception of removing some of the scanning artifacts have left them un-retouched.

Figure 1 – Napolean Sarong “Yound Couple c1870” lady. In the public domain by virtue of its age.

I’d like for fun today to follow-up on the theme of Oscar Wilde. We have the crisp expressive photograph, indeed photographs, by Napoleon Sarony taken in 1882. Eighteen years later, and just before his premature death at forty-five Wilde visited the 1900 Paris Exposition. Indeed, he stopped at the exhibit of Thomas Edison inventions and was asked to speak into the cylinder phonograph. The result is this rather scratchy and indistinct recording of the “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” There is, of course, the question whether Wilde was captured on any of the Edison film of the Expo. The answer is unclear, but provocative. A short and very inconclusive video has emerged.

We may, I think, reflect on three points. First, is how inferior video record was at its birth compared to its cousin still photography. Second, how rapidly both voice and video recoding has improved in just a hundred years. And third is how much we desire to take those captured moments of the past to suddenly evolve into moving images. We wish to give them life.

Figure 1 – Portrait of Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony , 1882. From the Wikipedia, scan of an original in the Metropolitan Museon of Art, NYC, and in the public domain because of its age.

Last month I blogged about Evelyn Nesbit, “The World’s First Supermodel.” The beautiful portrait that I posted was by “Sarony’, and this got me interested in exactly who Sarony was.  The picture in question was most probably by Otto Sarony ((1850-1903)). Otto was one of three famous Sarony portrait artists. Such artists were the people that have given us those marvelously fleeting moments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are the people who ultimately preserved for posterity those faces. And it is, perhaps, difficult to project back to a time when to get an enduring picture of yourself or a loved one. You couldn’t just raise a cell phone in front of your face.  You couldn’t even use a Kodak Brownie or 35 mm camera. You had to deliberately and quite consciously go into a photographer’s parlor. Many of these portraitists were mere technicins. Others had a gift for their craft that endures the ages. And we may begin with one of the true greats, Napoleon Sarony (1821-1896), who was Otto’s father.

Napoleon Sarony was born in Quebec in 1821 and moved to New York City sometime around 1836. Early in his career, he was an illustrator for Currier and Ives and subsequently partnered with James Major to form their own lithography business, Sarony & Major, in 1843. Napoleon left this successful business in 1867. He established a photography studio at a point when celebrity photographs were a major fad. Photographers paid these celebrities to sit for them and then retained full rights on the images which they sold to a star hungry public. As an example, Sarony is reported to have paid the popular stage actress Sarah Bernhardt $1,500 to pose for his camera. This is equivalent to about $20,000 today.

Napoleon Sarony was extremely well connected. Along with Mark Twain, he was involved in the founding of the Salmagundi Club, an association of artists, and was also a member of the Tile Club whose members included well-known authors and journalists. Thousand of people came to sit for him including many important figures of the day such as: William Tecumseh Sherman, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde.

Figure 1 is one of the portraits that Napoleon Sarony took of Oscar Wilde. It is significant for two reasons. First, it shows Sarony’s marvelous ability to capture a person’s spirit and individuality. The shoes and stockings are wonderful and then there is the dreamy background figures, which perhaps denote symbolically the vision of the poet. Second, it is the photograph that extended copyright protection to photographs. The Burrow-Giles lithographic Company used unauthorized lithographs of this image in an advertisement. Sarony sued in a case that ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court, which affirmed a lower court ruling. Sarony won a judgment of $600 in 1884, but American photographers won the right to copyright protect their work.

“Lola Montez – 1851” by Southworth & Hawes. From the Wikipedia and in the public domain in the United States because of its age. Original is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.

In my post yesterday, I described the singer Lillie Langtry as being the most likely real-life source for Conan Doyle’s Irene Adler.  This is indeed the case, and besides it gave me the opportunity to share William Downey’s marvelous portrait of Miss Langtry. There are however two other possible candidates and again we have lovely portraits of them.

The first was Lola Montez, a Irish dancer who became the lover of Ludwig I of Bavaria and came to influence national politics. For Montez we have a lovely 1851 daguerreotype by none other than the great American daguerrotypists Southworth & Hawes.

The other possibility was the singer Ludmilla Stubel, alleged lover and later wife of Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria. There is at least one extant photograph of Ludmilla which can be found at this link. Johann Salvator renounced his titles and in 1889 married Ludmilla “Milli”, who was an opera dancer in London and therefore far below his station. The story sounds a bit like that of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Unfortunately, this couple was doomed. Johann purchased a ship named the Santa Margareta and the two sailed for South America. In February 1890 they set sail from Montevideo, Uruguay, heading for Valparaíso in Chile. They were last seen on 12 July in Cape Tres Puntas, Argentina. It is believed that his ship was lost during a storm off Cape Horn. It wasn’t until 2 February, 1911 that he was officially declared dead.

The story from there follows that of Princes Anastassia of Russia. Following their disappearance there were persistent rumors and “sightings,” stories that they had assumed new identities in South America. In May of 1945 a German born lithographer in Norway, Alexander Hugo Køhler, “confessed” on his deathbed to being Johann Salvator. He claimed that he had bought the real Køhler’s identity and that it was Køhler who had actually died at sea. Heirs of Køhler have yet to be successful in laying claim to Salvator’s fortune, and it would seem a matter for a real life Sherlock Holmes. There is an interesting blog “Beyond the Yella Dog” that in true Holmesian fashion uses photography comparing a photograph of Salvator with one of Køhler. The attachment of the earlobes is just too different. Ultimately, the question can, in fact, be settled by DNA analysi, and in 2007 Køhler’s heirs requested this, but I can find no record of a resolution. If and when that finally happens, it may well be that molecular biology not photography will settle the matter of Salvator once and for all. The matter of Irene Adler however will remain open. This is fitting as she was meant to be a woman of mystery.

Figure 1 – Lillie Langtry, 1885 by William Downey. From the Wikipedia and in the public domain because of its age.

On Sunday I was thinking about the role of photography in fiction. Well, yes I was resisting the notion that there were better ways to spend my time, and it is true that “an idle mind is the Devil’s workshop.” Ah well! I was not so much thinking about Jimmy Olsen in Superman comics or even Jimmy Stewart’s role in the movie “Rear Window.”  I was more interested in how photography came into play in, say, the first fifty years or so of photography, which would take us to about 1888. Then I started wondering about whether photography played a role in any of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

This took me to “A Scandal in Bohemia.” (1891). Briefly the plot is that Watson is visiting Holmes when a visitor arrives, who introduces himself as Count Von Kramm, an agent for a wealthy client. It being elementary, Holmes quickly deduces that he is in fact none other than Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and the hereditary King of Bohemia.

The King is to become engaged to Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meiningen, a young Scandinavian princess. However, the plot thickens. It seems that five years earlier he had an affair with American opera singer, Irene Adler. The king is afraid that if his fiancée’s highly-principled family learns of his impropriety, they will call off the marriage. It also appears that there are letters and, dum dee dum dum, a photograph of him with Miss Adler. , He has sought desperately to regain the letters and photograph. He has offered to pay for them, and Irene Adler has threatened to send them to his fiance’s parents.

The photograph is described to Holmes as a cabinet (5½ by 4 inches) too bulky for a lady to carry upon her person. The plot goes forth from there in typically Holmesian fashion. In the end Holmes manages to steal the photograph, but to his chagrin finds out that Irene Adler has replaced it with a picture of herself alone along with a note saying that while she will keep the original for her own protection, she will keep the king’s secret. From then on Homes always refers to Irene Adler as “that woman.” She is the only woman who ever bested him at his own game. As Watson recounts in the beginning of A Scandal in Bohemia:

“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer — excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.”

Being fictional, there are, of course, no actual mages of Adler – well perhaps that is not quite the case. There remains the question of who is the fictional source for the character. This seems most likely to be the great American singer Lillie Langtry. Langtry was the lover of Edward, the Prince of Wales.  She was referred to as Jersey Lily because like Adler she was born in New Jersey. After Edward Langtry was believed to have had affairs with other noatbles and as a result she was much speculated about in the press. As a celebrity and great beauty, there are many photographs of Lily Langtry. The image of Figure 1 is by London photographer William Downey and was taken in 1885.

Figure 1 – A London spotter watching for attacking planes during the Battle of Britain c1940. From the US NARA and in the public domain in the United States.

It is difficult to realize that both 100 and 70 years ago the world was locked in global war. There was an airshow in the United Kingdom last weekend to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain, when the Royal Air force ferociously defended their homeland against aerial attack. It was a precarious moment when Britain faced the real possibility of annihilation. It was fulcrum point for human civilization and as Winston Churchill said seventy years ago on 20 August 1940:

“Never was so much owed by so many to so few was a wartime speech made by the British Prime Minister “

In light of this, it always seems remarkable how quick we are to see war as a viable option.The current list of ongoing armed conflicts is truly staggering. I have neither explanations, solutions, or platitudes. I have only to say that there is a strange bearded man, whom I pass on my commute home. He stands on particularly conspicuous intersection with a handwritten anti-war sign. He stands there expressionless in all weather, which in New England can be quite an undertaking. We all think him crazy. But I have to wonder, who really are the crazy ones?

Figure 1 – Solar print of wild fennel from Henry Fox Talbot’s “The Pencil of Nature.” In the public domain because of its age.

In six installments from 1844 to 1846 Henry Fox Talbot published his ground-breaking “The Pencil of Nature.” The concept was drawing with light. One of the ways that Talbot drew with light (see Figure 1) was to place a leaf or other object between a glass plate and a sheet of photosensitive paper and create a “sun print.” The photosensitivity of some materials, their tendency to bleach (lighten) or to darken when exposed to light was well known at the time.  The big issue was “fixing” the image.

Perhaps the earliest recognition of photosensitivity was the suntan that our ancient ancestors quickly developed in a Mesopotamian sun. If you didn’t walk around fully naked, the selective nature of tanning (loincloth lines) became quickly obvious.  Our own melanocytes contain melanin the original photosensitive material.

So OK. But now comes the stupid and dangerous part. People are now using their own skin as photographic paper, creating art on the surface of their bodies.  This can be accomplished by “drawing” with sunblock lotion other opaque substances and then going out and burning yourself to a crisp. I do not have to tell you how the various dermatological societies feel about this. But it is, like tattooing, an art form, albeit a much more dangerous one.

Figure 1 – Ice mountains on Pluto taken by the New Horizons Planetary Explorer, from NASA and in the public domain.

It seems most appropriate to end this week with an image of Pluto taken on its flyby from the New Horizons planetary explorer. Planetary explorer? The words really boggle the mind. The photograph shows ice mountains, most probably made of water, because the dominant ice forms on Pluto, methane and nitrogen, are not strong enough to support two mile high mountains. It is curious how Pluto now seems an old familiar friend despite its 1 billion mile distance from us. In reality nothing could be more alien.  And the mountains are relatively new, perhaps no more than 100 million years, judging from the degree of cratering. Hmm, says Mr. Spock. There are previously unknown terraforming mechanisms at play here! It is easy to say that these are previously unimaginable images.  But that is not really so. For hundreds of years we have imagined what if, and the what if’s are invariably cast in the mindset of the technology of the day. That’s the delightful quaintness of writers like Jules Verne.  And in the meanwhile robotic eyes take us, through photography and other instrumentation, on an amazing journey, that more and more seems to be an integral part of human destiny.

Figure 1 – Photograph of Evelyn Nesbit by Sarony 1902. From the Wikipedia and in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Continuing on the theme of sexism and imagery, I was reading the other day an article in BBC Culture by Lindsay Baker about “Evelyn Nesbitt – the World’s First Supermodel.” We have discussed the fashion industry in this blog several times. But the fact remains that there is, indeed must be, a symbiotic relationship between an exploitative industry and the models themselves. The problem is that for a young neophyte in the game the money and the power are all on one side of the relationship. Of course, there needed to be a first and it is not surprising that the first occurred as soon as photography became a potent force in advertising.

Florenced Evelyn Nesbit (1884 – 1967), was known professionally as Evelyn Nesbit, was a popular American chorus girl and artists’ mode. At the turn of the 20^th century the figure and face of Evelyn Nesbit was everywhere. Beyond mass circulation newspaper and magazine advertisements, she was to be found on souvenir items and calendars. She was indeed the world’s first supermodel, defining the meaning of the term and profession. She was a cultural celebrity and she posed for a several of the leading, and mainstream, artists of the day including: James Carroll Beckwith, Frederick S. Church, and notably Charles Dana Gibson, who made her the quintessential “Gibson Girl“.

It is odd to me that I have read the story of Nesbitt so many times in different contexts. She caught the eye of architect – socialite Stanford White, who first gained the family’s trust then sexually assaulted Evelyn while she was unconscious. In one of the sensational trials (Papers of the day called it “The Trial of the Century”) of the era Nesbit’s jealous husband, multi-millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw, shot and murdered Stanford White on the rooftop theatre of Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 25, 1906. Think that you’ve heard this story before? Evelyn Nesbit figures as a character in the musical “Ragtime,” and was played in the movie version by Lady Cora herself, Elizabeth McGovern.

By today’s standard Nesbit’s portraits are tame. She was always fully clothed when photographed. But the key point was the undercurrent, the suggestion that there was something more, something erotic lurking beneath the surface. One could argue, in our era of explicit sexuality, that this mystery is lost and as such the image diminished. The subtlety is lost!