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| Southworth & Hawes | |
|---|---|
| Name | Southworth & Hawes |
| Formation | 1843 |
| Dissolution | 1863 |
| Headquarters | Boston, Massachusetts |
| Founders | Albert Sands Southworth; Josiah Johnson Hawes |
| Fields | Daguerreotype photography; portraiture; stereoscopic images |
Southworth & Hawes Southworth & Hawes were a Boston-based daguerreotype partnership formed by Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes, active primarily from the 1840s through the 1860s. The studio became renowned for portraiture of politicians, writers, artists, scientists, clergy, and social figures, attracting sitters from across the United States and Europe. Their work intersected with contemporaries and institutions such as Mathew Brady, Oscar Rejlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and collections like the Boston Athenaeum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Southworth and Hawes began working together in Boston during the antebellum period, a time when daguerreotype practitioners such as John Plumbe Jr., Samuel Morse, and Gaspard-Félix Tournachon influenced visual culture. The partnership established a studio opposite the Boston National Bank and attracted figures associated with Harvard University, Boston Athenaeum, and the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Their career overlapped with American events and personalities like Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Webster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott, though the studio also photographed European visitors linked to Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and literary figures such as Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. The firm navigated changes in photographic technology concurrent with innovations by Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and later developments by George Eastman. Southworth and Hawes ceased partnership in the early 1860s as newer processes and practitioners like Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner shifted the market.
The studio specialized in the daguerreotype process developed from experiments by Louis Daguerre and informed by scientific figures such as Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Hippolyte Bayard. They employed techniques similar to innovators like Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre and contemporaries including Philip Henry Delamotte and Herman G. Schnetzler. Their plates demonstrated influences traceable to chemical research by Justus von Liebig and optical advances by John Herschel. Southworth and Hawes favored careful lighting and posing practices comparable to portraitists such as Nadar and Caroline Watson. They produced finely finished whole-plate, half-plate, and quarter-plate images, often presenting sitters in poses resonant with painted portraits by artists in the circles of John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, and Samuel F. B. Morse. The studio also created stereoscopic views paralleling works by Sir David Brewster and commercial producers like George Barnard.
The Southworth & Hawes studio functioned as a commercial atelier interacting with institutions and clientele tied to Harvard College, the Boston Society of Natural History, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. They employed assistants and collaborated with printmakers and framers associated with businesses like Goupil & Cie and Samuel Root. The studio’s practice intersected with exhibition venues including the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and the Great Exhibition networks, and with periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and The New York Times. Their pricing, client lists, and marketing paralleled contemporaneous firms like Mathew Brady and city operations in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The studio maintained relationships with collectors and patrons including trustees of the Boston Athenaeum, benefactors linked to Isabella Stewart Gardner, and philanthropic figures like George Peabody.
Southworth & Hawes photographed an array of prominent individuals from political, literary, scientific, artistic, and religious spheres. Their sitters included statesmen and jurists associated with Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and jurists from the United States Supreme Court; literary figures tied to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Fanny Kemble; scientists and inventors linked to Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Samuel Morse, Edward Hitchcock, Benjamin Silliman, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elias Howe; artists and actors from circles that included Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, Thomas Ball, John La Farge, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, and Frederic Edwin Church; clergy and reformers such as figures connected with William Ellery Channing, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, and abolitionists associated with Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. They also captured European visitors and cultural figures of connection to Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Hans Christian Andersen.
Contemporaneous critics and patrons compared Southworth & Hawes to leading portraitists like Mathew Brady and praised their tonal subtlety in journals including The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly. Their work influenced photographers across the United States and Europe, informing practices used by studios in New York City, Philadelphia, London, Paris, and Rome. Collectors such as trustees of the Boston Athenaeum, curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and institutions like the Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress recognized their importance in exhibitions and catalogs. The studio’s aesthetic contributed to pictorial conventions later echoed by photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Ansel Adams, and photographic historians chronicled in works by Nancy M. West and Gisèle Freund.
Many Southworth & Hawes daguerreotypes survive in institutional collections: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Boston Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Library of Congress, and the National Portrait Gallery (United States). Conservation efforts reflect practices developed in collaboration with preservationists at the Smithsonian Institution and conservation scientists informed by research at Harvard University and the Getty Conservation Institute. Major exhibitions have been organized by curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and regional museums, placing their work alongside materials connected to Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Carleton Watkins. Southworth & Hawes images continue to inform scholarship in American visual culture, history of photography, and museum curation.
Category:American photographers Category:19th-century photographers