Notes on the Major Whitman Photographers

Abstract

John Plumbe: 1809-1857, born and raised in Wales.He was a railroad surveyor and one of the first advocates for a transcontinental railroad, which became his lifelong enthusiasm; photography was for him a way to make money to support his railroad schemes.He wrote Sketches of Iowa and Wisconsin (1839) after moving to Dubuque in 1836.He learned photography in Washington, D.C., began his work in 1840 in Philadelphia, opened the United States Photographic Institute in 1841 in Boston, and by 1845 this innovative merchandiser had a chain of studios in fourteen cities (including Dubuque, Louisville, and Cincinnati) headquartered in New York.He took the earliest photographs of the U. S. Capitol and the earliest photographs of slaves.He developed a process called the "Plumbeotype," which claimed to be a method of reproducing daguerreotypes on paper (but which really involved hiring artists to make lithographs), and he developed ways to color daguerreotypes.His Broadway studio-the Plumbe National Daguerrian Depot-was unexcelled in its collection of daguerreotypes of famous people, and WW often visited, where perhaps he had one or both of his 1840s daguerreotypes taken.In September 1846, Whitman said (in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle) of Plumbe's daguerreotypes that it was "hardly possible to conceive any higher perfection of art, in the way of transferring the representation of that subtle thing, human expression, to the tenacious grip of a picture which is never to fade!" Whitman went on to celebrate how "Plumbe's beautiful and multifarious pictures all strike you .. .with their naturalness, and the life-look of the eye-that soul of the face!" WW saw Plumbe in July of that year at the gallery.He was so successful that the New York Herald called him the "American Daguerre," but in 1847 Plumbe, whose attention had been more on railroad schemes than on his studios, sold his New York gallery and soon went bankrupt; in 1849 he followed the gold rush to California.He committed suicide in Dubuque in 1857.

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