Likeness and Landscape Thomas M Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype

October 3, 2018 /Photography News/ Born 209 years agone today, on Oct 3, 1809, Thomas Martin Easterly was one of the most prominent and well-known daguerreotypists in the Midwest United States during the 1850s, with his studio becoming one of the first permanent fine art galleries in Missouri.

By 1844, Easterly had begun practicing photography taking outdoor photographs of architectural landmarks and scenic sites in Vermont. Amid his earliest daguerreotypes, fabricated a decade before outdoor photography was popular or assisting, those of the Winooski and Connecticut rivers are the just known examples to be cocky-consciously influenced by the romantic landscape paintings of the Hudson River School artists. He was likewise the first and merely daguerreotypist to identify his work using engraved signatures and descriptive captions.

Ruins of the Great St. Louis Fire, 17-18 May 1849. Daguerreotype past Thomas Thousand. Easterly, 1849. Source: Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collections

No-Che-Ninga-An, Chief of the Iowas, 1845

Lynch'south Slave Market, 104 Locust Street, 1852, past Thomas Martin Easterly. According to the National Parks Service, "there were constant reminders of the horrors of slavery in antebellum St. Louis. One of the worst involved the open sales of slaves at various places along the city'south busiest streets, which was an accustomed community practice. Regular slave auctions and sales were held in several places, near notably at the slave market run by Bernard Chiliad. Lynch on Locust Street between Fourth and Fifth. This market was moved in 1859 to Broadway and Clark Streets. Lynch's "slave pens" were onetime private residences with bars placed on all the windows to secure them similar prisons. Slaves were herded off steamboats and up the street to the slave houses, then sold to persons, especially after 1840, from outside St. Louis, mostly from the western counties in Missouri or farther down the river. Families were cleaved upwards, with children taken from mothers, fathers sold down the river, husbands and wives separated. And all of this was washed in total view of crowds wishing to buy and passersby going about their daily business." Source: Missouri History Museum.

In the fall of 1845, Easterly traveled to the Midwest United States and toured the Mississippi River with Frederick F. Webb every bit representatives of the Daguerreotype Fine art Marriage. The two gained some notoriety from their photography of the criminals convicted of the murder of George Davenport in October of that year. Iowa newspapers reported that Easterly and Webb had achieved a "splendid likeness" of the men before long earlier their execution.

Easterly soon became popular for his portraits of prominent residents of St. Louis and visiting celebrities which were displayed in a temporary gallery on Glasgow Row. One of these portraits was that of Principal Keokuk taken March 1847. He too took a daguerreotype of a lightning commodities, one of the get-go recorded "instantaneous" photographic images, while in St. Louis. This was later recorded in the Iowa Sentinel equally an "Amazing Accomplishment in Art". Before returning to Vermont in August 1847, the St. Louis Reveille described his as an "unrivaled daguerreotypist".

Easterly was brought back to Missouri past John Ostrander, founder of the first daguerreotype gallery in St. Louis, in early 1848. Preparing for an extended "tour of the south", Ostringer asked Easterly to manage his portrait gallery. Esterly would go on running the gallery when Ostringer died a short time after. Many of his unique streetscapes depicting mid-19th-century urban life were taken from the window'due south of Ostringer's gallery. In June 1850, he married schoolteacher Anna Miriam Bailey and settled in St. Louis permanently.

Daguerreotype portrait of Enoch Long, circa 1855, Thomas Easterly. Source: Missouri Historical Club

By the 1860s near photographers had abandoned the daguerreotype procedure for the albumen and collodion processes. Easterly felt that the daguerreotype was an fine art form and refused to adopt new techniques, urging the public to "save your old daguerreotypes for you volition never come across their like again". His studio suffered from declining patronage, and he himself developed poor health, probably due to the mercury poisoning often associated with the daguerreotype procedure.

Despite the declining interest for pictures on silvery, he was able to maintain his gallery until information technology burned in a burn down in 1865. He was forced to move to a smaller location and continued working in near obscurity until his death in St. Louis on March 12, 1882.

Daguerreotype Gallery of Thomas Martin Easterly, St. Louis, Missouri, 1851. Author: unattributed. Source: Missouri History Museum

After his death, his wife sold most of his personal collection to John Scholton, another noted St. Louis photographer. The Scholton family eventually donated the plates to the Missouri Historical Society where they remained for nearly a century before being rediscovered during the 1980s by art scholars studying pre-American Civil War photography.

Although his reputation was limited to the Midwest during his lifetime, Easterly is considered to accept been one of the foremost experts in the field of daguerreotype photography in the United states of america during the mid-to-tardily 19th century.

The almost complete appreciation of Easterly's life and work, with 233 illustrations is Dolores Kilgo'due south volume "Likeness and Landscape: Thomas M. Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype" published by the Missouri Historical Society Press in 1994. An exhibit of the aforementioned proper noun accompanied the book.

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Source: http://www.photography-news.com/2011/10/in-photos-remembering-19th-century.html

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