Lot 168: Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894) & Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901) , portrait of samuel appleton

half-plate daguerreotype, in the original push-button leather case, with 'Samuel Appleton, Born in Ipswich, N. H. 1766, Died in Boston, Mass. 1853/Married in Boston, Mass. 1818, Mary Lekain Gore, Widow of John Gore' in gilt on the rear cover, circa 1850

measurements note half-plate

This half-plate daguerreotype shows Boston merchant and philanthropist Samuel Appleton (1766 - 1853) seated in the study of his Beacon Hill mansion. At the time of this portrait, Appleton was retired and had devoted himself to charitable works. He was a generous benefactor to many New England organizations, including Massachusetts General Hospital, the Boston Athenaeum, Dartmouth College, the New Ipswich Academy, the Boston Female Asylum, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, among others. The Appleton Chapel at Harvard University was built with money bequeathed by the merchant at his death. Flawless in its execution, this daguerreotype offers ample justification for the reputations of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. In addition to being photographers of the first rank, Southworth and Hawes were technical innovators who understood every detail of their craft, from plate preparation, to development, to final presentation. Their complete mastery of the unruly daguerreotype process allowed them greater freedom to photograph outside the controlled conditions of their studio, in a wide variety of situations previously unavailable to daguerreotypists. Their daguerreotype of Samuel Appleton is a case in point. Taken indoors, and illuminated solely by available light, the image is nonetheless filled with detail and has a remarkable three-dimensionality. Born in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, Appleton grew up in what was then frontier country. He helped found a new township in Maine at the age of twenty two, and cleared land there for a farm. His vocation soon shifted from farming to business, and after operating stores in New Ipswich and Ashburnham, Massachusetts, he opened a shop in Boston with his brother in 1794. Their business grew rapidly, and Appleton extended his interests to the cotton industry and real estate. He was a member of the Massachusetts state legislature between 1828 and 1831, and as he became more successful he exerted an increasing amount of influence within the business and political world of Boston. At age fifty-three, Appleton married Mary Lekain Gore, and the couple's elegant mansion became a meeting place for friends and family. At sixty, Appleton retired from business and became a philanthropist. Although the Appleton mansion at 37 Beacon Street no longer stands, its grandeur is evident in this daguerreotype, as well as in a nineteenth-century painted portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Appleton in their home (reproduced in The Appletons of Beacon Hill, Boston, 1973, p. 82). The dual portrait shows the couple seated in an interior two-storey circular colonnade, furnished with statuary, an immense oriental carpet, and other lavish appointments. The daguerreotype offered here almost certainly shows a room off of this colonnade, and the interior window in the upper right looks out upon it. Fanny Appleton Longfellow, wife of renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, spoke in the days following her uncle's death of the room he so often occupied: 'the green Morocco chair vacant and the table with the bell and books, just as Uncle Sam had left them. I did not look upon his dead face, for I could not destroy my happy memory of him in his beautiful old age, and so I shall always think of him with the same freshness of color and glory of silver locks crowning him like a halo' (ibid., p. 275). Fanny Longfellow could easily have been referring to the present daguerreotype, taken shortly before Appleton's death in 1853, which includes the very elements she describes.