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Powerful Photograph of Aging Frederick Douglass, the Most Photographed American of the Nineteenth Century |
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Celebrity portrait photographer George Kendall Warren of Boston took this photograph of Douglass in ca. 1879, when Douglass was serving as Marshal of the District of Columbia. Douglass understood the power of photography and became the most photographed man of any race in the United States in the nineteenth century.
[FREDERICK DOUGLASS].
George Kendall Warren, carte-de-visite portrait, ca. 1879. Albumen photograph, on original mount. 1 p., 2 x 3½ in.
Inventory #27927
Price: $3,750
Douglass “embraced photography as a great democratic art,” declaring in his 1861 “Lecture on Pictures” that “The humblest servant girl, whose income is but a few shillings per week, may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and even royalty, with all its precious treasures, could not purchase fifty years ago.”[1]
In the same lecture, Douglass praised Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the daguerreotype, “If by means of the all-pervading electric fluid [Samuel F. B.] Morse has coupled his name with the glory of bringing the ends of the earth together, and of converting the world into a whispering gallery, Daguerre, by the simple but all-abounding sunlight, has converted the planet into a picture gallery.”[2]
An engraving from this photograph appears in the first edition of Douglass’ third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881).
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was an orator, journalist, abolitionist, and distinguished African-American leader. Born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland, as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he assumed the name Douglass after he escaped from slavery in 1838. That year, he married Anna Murray (1813-1882), and they had five children. In 1841, Douglass successfully addressed a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention and was employed as its agent. He wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845 to document his experiences and sufferings and to silence those who contended that a man of his abilities could not have been a slave. Douglass soon became a noted anti-slavery orator and supporter of women’s rights, lecturing in both the United States and England. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights and signed its Declaration of Sentiments. Douglass edited his own newspaper, The North Star, for several years. In 1855, he published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. During the Civil War, he was instrumental in advocating for African-American combat units, and in raising troops. He fought for passage of the Thirteenth (Abolition), Fourteenth (Equal Protection), and Fifteenth (Voting Rights) Amendments, through testimony to Congress, reports to the President, and regular appearances on the lecture circuit. In 1872, Douglass was nominated for vice-president by the Equal Rights Party on a ticket headed by Victoria Woodhull. Douglass was the first African American to serve in important federal posts, including Marshal of the District of Columbia (1877-1881), Recorder of Deeds for Washington D.C. (1881-1886), and Minister-General to Haiti (1889-1891). In 1881, he published Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his third and final autobiography, which he revised in 1892. After the death of his wife Anna, Douglass married white suffragist Helen Pitts (1838-1903) in 1884, a marriage his children opposed.
George Kendall Warren (1834-1884) was born in New Hampshire and opened a daguerreotype studio in Lowell in 1851. He specialized in portraiture but also focused on senior-class photographs for colleges, including Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, Harvard, Brown, Yale, and Rutgers. He opened a studio in Cambridge in 1863 and began an extended project of photographing the architecture and campus life of Harvard. In 1869, the Union Pacific Railroad commissioned Warren to document the building of the transcontinental railroad, and he produced a series of images that illustrated the engineering challenges of building a railway across the rugged western terrain. In 1870, he moved to Boston, where he hoped a second studio. He reestablished himself as a celebrity portrait photographer. He received a gold medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia for his work. He died at the age of 50 in a railroad accident in Medford, Massachusetts.
Condition: On original mount with photographer’s backmark on mount recto, and small embossed stamp of G. W. Thorne of New York on lower mount recto; inscribed “F Douglas” in pencil on verso in an unknown early hand; minimal wear.
[1] John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liveright, 2015), ix, x, 127. There are 160 known photographs of Douglass, defined as distinct poses. By contrast, there are 155 of George Custer, 126 of Abraham Lincoln, and perhaps 150 of Ulysses S. Grant. Many of the hundreds of photographs of “Buffalo Bill” Cody and Mark Twain were taken after 1900.
