The Photographic Crayon Portrait

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THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CRAYON PORTRAIT:

NINETEENTH-CENTURY ICONS OF ABSENT FAMILY MEMBERS

AND PRESENT-DAY RELICS OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

DiAnne Iverglynne

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History at Boise State University

April 6, 2006

The thesis presented by DiAnne Iverglynne entitled The Photographic Crayon Portrait: Nineteenth-Century Icons of Absent Family Members and Present-day Relics of Latter-day Saints is hereby approved:

______Dr. Barton Barbour Date Advisor

______Dr. Sandra Schackel Date Committee Member

______Dr. Todd Shallat Date Committee Member

______Dr. John R. Pelton Date Dean, Graduate College

For Mom

Doris Jean DuMond

(July17, 1930 - July 9, 1994)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project simply could not have happened without the enthusiastic support of my close friends and family. I wish to thank them all: Ned Swisher for allowing me to run electricity to my van on the coldest nights. Bonnie Frazier-Shewmaker tirelessly checked in with me to see if I needed assistance or nutrition. My daughter, Jennifer

Choquette, and her boyfriend Eric Morrison, have assisted me in countless ways, especially in the library. Lillian Pittman, helped me maintain center. Jill Joseph volunteered her great typing skills in transposing text from references. Chase Hills provided great encouragement and a camper trailer. My friends are wonderful.

Candace Akins, senior manuscripts editor at Cornell University Press, has traveled with me studying photographic crayons, and has been an adopted sister of mine for over twenty years. Knowing that she has been anxious for me to, “just finish already!” has been a real boon in bringing this thesis to fruition. She plans to help develop the thesis into a manuscript to submit to a press.

Beyond these dear friends, I have had tremendous support from my committee:

Dr. Barton Barbour, committee chair, gave me time when he had few moments for himself. All of his advice initiated a process within me that resulted in a better project.

Our readings and conferences provided the understanding of the development and human concerns of the Intermountain West. Understanding where I needed to be, more than I did, he allowed me none-the-less some wonderful time following Cabeza de Vaca across

the continent (no doubt wondering if I’d ever even get to overland freighting at my initial pace!). Thank you Dr. B!

Dr. Todd Shallat encouraged me during those times of fright we all have where putting our thoughts in publication is concerned. He is one of the most positive and uplifting professors I have known. With him on my committee, I could always sense somebody in my corner. Todd is interesting and fun. My experience at BSU is much richer for having studied under him.

Dr. Sandra Schackel has graciously joined my committee though her work schedule is enormous. Her friendly encouragement and help in my moving forward will always be remembered. Dr. Nick Schackel has the rare gift of being both a scholar and a genuinely warm spirit. Dr Miller, director of graduate studies in history at Boise State

University, has allowed my artistic background some room to exhibit itself as “quirky” while I am growing as a historian. Dr Joanne Klein has tirelessly worked toward the advancement of my progress both in the program and specifically with help with my this thesis. Thank you all. Your professional qualities and hard work are greatly appreciated.

I would also like to thank the friendly and helpful staff members of Boise State

University History Department, and the Albertson Library—especially the Interlibrary

Loan staff. Lastly, thank you all who offered interviews: Grant Romer from the George

Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film; Fay Cottle, Director of the Oneida Pioneer Museum; Mary Johnson, President of The Daughters Utah Pioneers

Museum, and her staff members; Bill Slaughter, Archivist for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) History Department and Museum; and various other members of the LDS church who freely offered their time and sentiments.

ABSTRACT

. . . The growth of ten thousand things prevents their dying out. ~ Lau Tsu

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), also known as Mormons, relate to photographic crayon portraits of ancestors and pioneers as iconologic figures of their religious heritage. This relationship to the portraits is a material extension of ancestral reverence, for which Mormons are well known. Within Mormon folk culture, these portraits have become a metonymic construct; meaning that metaphors and qualifiers to metaphors are experienced with an emotional attachment that is pervasive in, and directly linked to, cultural values. Because of this, these portraits represent an American form of religious iconology, and qualify as holy relics in Mormon museums, such as the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah. Yet, much information regarding the role of the photographic crayon portrait in nineteenth-century history of photography has been obscured, or passed over. Therefore, to understand the role of these portraits within Mormon folk culture and collectivism requires some interpretation of the photographic crayons’ role among non-Mormon Americans of the nineteenth century—this thesis will serve to just begin the task.

The photographic crayon portrait is absent from the canon of the history of photography. However, considering the photographic crayon portrait to be an unimportant player in the history of photography, or any other history of American folk culture is a grievous oversight. Why not celebrate the first Americana expression in formal portraiture? The photographic crayon portrait graced the walls of common people and their neighbors from the mid-1860s through the Great Depression. A broader appreciation of the overall class and culture indications regarding photographic crayon portraiture in nineteenth-century America, will facilitate an understanding of how those indications are extended in the religious iconology the portraits represent in Mormon folk culture.

This introduction to the photographic crayon portrait will serve historians who interpret Mormon collectivism within the broader American experience, and historians who examine class and culture issues in America during the Victorian era. In addition, This study will facilitate scholarship regarding frozen historical metaphors represented by the photographic crayon portraits throughout literature and theater at the turn of the twentieth century.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i ABSTRACT iii Independent Quotes v Illustrations vi Photographs vii INTRODUCTION ix Terminology xviii

I: CRAYON PORTRAITURE AND THE “PHOTO-PORTRAIT” 2 The Photographic Sketch 5 Concluding Chapter I 15 II: CULTURAL RESPONSE AND IMPLICATIONS 17 Artists and Photographers: Drawing the Class Lines 18 Laborers and Pioneers: Class and Consumer: Viewed in Metaphor, Innuendo, Sarcasm and Snobbery 22 Concluding Chapter II 53 III: MORMON FOLK CULTURE ICONOLOGY 55 IV: CONCLUSION 68 SOURCES 74 SOURCES CONSULTED BUT NOT CITED 81 APPENDIX 83 GLOSSARY 88

INDEPENDENT QUOTES

Page iii Lau Tsu. Source: Feng, Gia-fu and Jane English, trans. Tao Te Ching. New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, 1972. Page 78.

1 Nietzche. Source: Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick. Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers, London and New York: Routledge, a Taylor & Francis Group, 2002. Page 166.

1 Gombrich. Source: Sachko Macleod, Dianne. Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Page 63.

22 J.A. Barhydt. Source: Barhydt, J.A. Crayon Portraiture: Complete Instructions for Making Crayon Portraits on Crayon Paper and on Platinum, Silver and Bromide Enlargements: and Directions for the Use of Transparent Liquid Water Colors: and for Making French Crystals, Revised and enlarged edition. New York: The Baker & Taylor CO., 1890. Page15.

ILLUSTRATIONS

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x Henry Fox Talbot, from an original stereograph. Woodcut engraving on the right side. William Crawford, Keepers of the Light, p.17, figure 13. (See also photographs page v.)

2 Rubens, Peter Paul, Portrait of Isabella Brant, 1626. Black and red chalk, heightened with white, reinforced with pen and brush, 381x292 mm. British Museum, London. Burchard-d’Hulst 135.

8 An advertisement for Woodward's Solar Cameras from the 1878 book How to Paint Photographs, showing a medal awarded at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. Courtesy Wilgus collection.

19 Crayon Portraits of Richard Hildreth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. For Hildreth see “Notable American Unitarians: 1740-1900,” Harvard Square Library Unitarianism in America Online. http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/UIA%20Online/index.html. Samuel W. Rowse, who is highly spoken of in the letters of Charles Eliot Norton, drew Emerson’s image. See also William Roscoe Thayer, ed., Letters of John Holmes to James Russell Lowell and Others,1917. p.98.

22 Advertisement: “The Vacant Chair.” The Chicago Tribune. 3 January, 1869.

PHOTOGRAPHS

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Cover Mary L. Solomon, 1895. Courtesy of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum, Salt Lake City, Utah. Photographed by the author, July 28, 2005. x Henry Fox Talbot, from an original stereograph. (Left side.) William Crawford, Keepers of the Light, Page 17, figure 12. (See also illustrations page v.)

12 Crayon Portrait of Jane Emma Merrifield Williams 1890(?). Courtesy of the Oneida Pioneer Museum. Original image of Williams’ Family, 1895(?). Courtesy Carolyn Barnes Private Collection.

25 Ohio couple married 58 years. Photographer Jodi Cobb. “True Love.” National Geographic. February, 2006. Page 46-47.

26 Nebraska Homesteaders on Front Lawn. (Matron is in photographic crayon next to her husband, their children are with him, the farm hands are in the back row.) 1903. Reprinted from The American Family Farm. Page X.

27 Iowa settlers: children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren gather under the four pioneer ancestors in photographic crayons. Photographer Nina Leen, Life. 1934. Edward Steichen. The Family of Man. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955. Page 59.

28 Pioneer man in Utah brings mother’s image to the itinerant photographer’s tent and hang on tent wall behind family photograph. 1885(?). Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History/Geneology Department.

29 Presidents of the Relief Society; they brought the deceased member of their organization to their group portrait—in photographic crayon. 1890(?). Courtesy of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City. July 28, 2005

46 Lucille Pavelka. Born 1892. Age three or four years old. 1895(?). Willa Cather. My Ántonia. Page 427.

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52 Stage scene from “Cottie Mourns.” Unknown photographer. 1935-39(?). Frederick H. Koch. American Folk Plays. 1939. Page 533.

69 The photographic crayon portrait in a clever disguise. Photographer Stephen Livick. 1974. William Crawford. Keepers of the Light. 1979. Page 201.

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INTRODUCTION

To a modern-day Mormon individual experiencing a room filled with photographic crayon portraits, the images of the Utah Mormon pioneers represent the sacrifices these pioneers made from the 1840s to the 1860s as they gained a homeland and freedom of religion for their brethren. The portraits also evoke thoughts of other values held dear by Mormons. They evoke an emotional response described in terms of religious experience and church affiliation as well as in terms of family pride and heritage. Modern-day Mormons treat the portraits as religious or holy relics; that is,

Mormons display and protect the portraits as inspirational icons. Mormons of today aspire to be hard-working and committed to their faith—as stalwartly as their early pioneer ancestry. This meaningful contemplation that occurs when LDS members encounter these icons in a museum, at home, or at church is the result of many cultural and class transitions that occurred in the nineteenth century. Five cultural elements played a direct role in this phenomenon.

First, before the availability of photographic crayon portraits in the 1860s, artistically drawn and displayed portraits, known simply as “crayons” became popular among the bourgeois during the Industrial Revolution of the late 1700s. There is no photograph beneath this type of crayon portrait. The highly technical style of drawing evolved from preparatory drawings made for oil paintings in the late Renaissance. The

high art beginnings along with their popularity among the bourgeois secured these portraits’ status as a fine art well into the nineteenth century. To display a few friends or family members in the drawing room was considered a gesture of good taste. Among the bourgeois, the practice of including one’s own drawn portrait became not only acceptable, but also a status symbol. Formal portraiture no longer belonged expressly to the aristocracy.

Second, the earliest photography occurred simultaneously with early Mormonism.

Photographs did not yet appear in the media. Newspapers, journals, books and magazines typically reproduced artwork through engravings. A photograph traced for an engraving still had the appearance of an ink sketch in the reproduction. Below is such an example: a portrait taken by John Moffat in 1864 of Fox Talbot is on the left; on the right is the same image reproduced as a wood engraving so that the image could appear in volume three of

Louis Figuier’s Les Merveilles de la Science, 1867.

Source for this diptych: William Crawford, Keepers of Light, p.17.

People described photographs to others as being “from nature,” that is, from the natural world seen before them, be it indoors or outdoors. Art was considered higher in status—a creation of the human mind. The wood-engraving image on the right would hardly help describe a photograph to a person who had yet to observe one. The personal experience of actually viewing a photograph was therefore required in order to understand that a photograph was not a drawing—and did not look like a drawing.

The photograph was different from all previously known representations of the natural world.

All photographic processes available before the photographic crayon portrait demanded this same intimate knowledge: daguerreotypes must be held within arm’s length and at a precise angle for proper viewing; ambrotypes involved a glass plate and were typically palm-sized; stereographs required the stereopticon viewer; cartes de visite

(visiting cards) fit in a pocket; and the smallest, postage stamp portraits, were roughly a square inch. These were all made as personal keepsakes. They were meant to be displayed in an album or on a sideboard. Among all of these types of photographs, the daguerreotype alone was commercially available, and was just reaching the plains as the

Mormons made their journey westward in 1846. Undoubtedly, only a few Mormons of the first two pioneer groups had been photographed, perhaps some of them had yet to see a photograph.

A third cultural element of importance is that the Mormon’s prophet, Joseph

Smith, gave specific instruction regarding reverence and care for the dead. Many

Mormons adopted a doctrinal approach to his instructions. The commission given by

Joseph Smith suggests an additional iconologic thread to the history of the photographic

crayon portrait. In Mormon regions, the photographic crayon portraits have become more akin to holy relics. That is, they are permanently displayed in order to invoke reverence and provide inspiration for future generations, through a spiritual link to the early church saints and pioneers.

Fourth, Mormons and most other pioneer groups of the westward movement expressed a profound loneliness for loved-ones they might never see again. Some pioneers lost friends and family on the journey. Others left loved-ones behind in the East or in foreign homelands. Pioneers and homesteaders throughout the West documented this loneliness and longing for loved-ones in personal journals and letters. Such sentiments are only recently being understood as having a profound influence on regional developments in the West.

Fifth and last, the first life-sized photographs became commercially available in eastern cities approximately twenty years after the Mormons settled the Great Salt Lake basin. The typical advertisements of the photographic crayon portrait in the late 1860s promoted them as a means of maintaining the presence of deceased loved-ones, or of those left behind. In another few years, the photographic crayon portrait reached Mormon country. Making portraits of the deceased (rather than ostentatiously of oneself), and making portraiture generally less expensive through the photographic sketch, opened cultural sentiments toward the ownership of portraiture by the working class. Though they remained a luxury item even within the homes of the working class, portraits were now available for the first time to even lower income families.

These cultural elements provided the backdrop from which the Mormons, through their worldview, came to know and experience the portraits. Mormons, as can be said of

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most religious groups, exercise a “magic worldview.” That is, Mormons believe that through temple rituals, relationships are secured with the deceased in an afterlife.1

The Mormon photographic crayon portraits of pioneers are not necessarily considered to possess powers for intercession, as is believed of the holy relics of a canonized Catholic saint. However, within Mormon folk-culture, early Mormon pioneers are similar in status to the saints of Catholicism; both provide holy relics. The holy relics of Catholic Saints are a part of their physical body, such as a skull or a thighbone. Or as in the Shroud of Turin, thought to be the shroud that covered Jesus of Nazareth after he was crucified.2 Photographic crayon portraits of the pioneers are likewise holy relics.

Both Catholic and Mormon holy relics are collected, displayed, and maintained in ways that do not necessarily reflect contemporary practices in museology.

Through the portraits of Utah Pioneers, the Latter-day Saints revisit the themes of the Mormon exodus and pioneer hardships, doctrinal practices, freedom of religion, staunch work ethics and inventiveness, family values, persecution and perhaps in some cases martyrdom. The photographic crayon portraits are in turn emblematic of Mormon folk culture and religious themes. Thus each photographic crayon portrait transcends to an iconological representation of Mormon mores. As such, the portraits outlast the fickle trends of fashion in Mormon communities; the portraits represent America’s only folk-

1 Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion Abridged edition (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1942) Vol.1, pp.11-48. This section discusses Sympathetic magic and its two branches, Homeopathic and Contagious magic. For a discussion on how Sympathetic magic pertains to religion, see pp.48-60. Mormon rituals can most easily be described in terms of the Homeopathic or Imitative branch of Sympathetic magic. The rituals conform to what Frazer calls “The Law of Similarity.” Thus an object or an individual will represent another object or individual in the ceremony. An individual may represent the deceased in this manner in order to receive or perform by proxy the “Temple Ordinances” for that deceased individual. See Appendix Figure 3 to see a Remembrance book sheet for a deceased individual with the Temple Ordinances performed for that individual by others through a Sympathetic ceremony.

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culture based, religious iconology; and they are the only religious iconology in America, elsewhere perhaps as well, in photographic icons.

Within the folk culture of Mormonism, numerous museums have filled high walls, shoulder to shoulder and top to bottom, with photographic crayons intended to remain on permanent display. One museum alone, the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers

Museum in Salt Lake City, has approximately 2,600 photographic crayon portraits on permanent display. Mormons are committed to exhibiting every one of them as long as is physically possible. This powerful display of devotion to the portraits and the manner in which they are displayed serves as the primary justification for this thesis.

To understand how the portraits first became commonplace among Mormons, this thesis examines the class, cultural and metaphorical aspects of the portraits throughout nineteenth-century America. Photographs, newspaper advertisements, contemporary magazines and journals, collected letters of some of the bourgeois as well as some of the elite of the Victorian middle class, interviews with Mormons, literary and theatrical works from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1930s, theatrical histories, literary histories, histories of photography and art, social critiques, linguistic theories, collections experts, and of cultural history theoretics inform this thesis.

Chapter one provides a descriptive historical sketch of crayon portraiture. A brief introduction to the non-photographic crayon portrait and to the photographic crayon portrait will assist the reader in keeping the two art forms correctly identified where terms are similar. This is important because secondary source material is nearly nonexistent on the photographic variety. In addition, confusion about the topic and terms is rampant in the few sources that do exist. A few extant paragraphs are word-munched ad nauseum.

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Each new turn at re-writing those paragraphs appears only to have weakened the historical knowledge and understanding of photographic crayons. This chapter will serve to develop a summary chronological history more closely tied to the development of the aesthetics, providing the information most needed for the readers of this thesis.

Though gaps remain in the timeline between the technological staging and the development of the commercial aesthetics, there is evidence that permits a few reasonable presumptions of what happened in those instances. Where presumptions occur they are discussed with candor, and from a personal working knowledge of the manner in which artistic aesthetics evolve, in photography, and in fine art drawing.

Chapter two will describe class and culture related responses. My research shows that the photographic crayon portrait became a specialized metonymic construct for the presence of the deceased, or the spirit in an afterlife. That is to say, that as a portrait, the face was evidence of the being (a hand of the same being could not constitute a “portrait” of the being). To the photographic crayon portrait another level of meaning was added, in that the essence of the being was present in the room through the life-sized portrait made after the referent died; because the portrait was enlarged from a photograph taken while that person was still alive, and because the portrait was life-sized, it had “life-like” qualities.

The photographic crayon portrait, enlarged and drawn after death, carries the essence of the living person—photographed while alive and posing for the photographer.

Thus the owner is able to substitute, or imagine life. Admittedly this is a simple explanation of how the essence of the being continues through the portal of the life-sized framed image on the wall. However, chapter two will discuss the simplicity of pervasive

metaphoric constructs. The images were used as the Everyman, the companion, and as proxy “sitters” in family group portraits.

The photographic portraits also became a synecdoche for the working class in literature and theater of contemporaries. That is, a photographic crayon portrait might be used as a “stage prop” to suggest to the audience a working-class home. This chapter establishes the importance of a broader perspective on the cultural implications that photographic crayon portraits provide when considering nineteenth-century American class sentiments. Current students of early twentieth century literature or theater will benefit from this information. The metaphoric coding embedded in the use of the portraits in literature, theater, and among the working class is otherwise lost to researchers, because the photographic crayon portrait and its history are obscured or unknown to most people today. This is true even of museum professionals. The “frozen historical metaphor” is examined in order to show how common this portrait process became in

American working-class homes for a period spanning five decades.

Chapter three discusses how the use of the portraits as memorial iconography is foundational for religious iconology within the community of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS). This chapter will separate issues of religious symbolism, imagery, iconology, and religious relics implicated through this Mormon folk-culture adaptation of the portraits. This thesis does not claim that the photographic crayon portraits have become religious symbols or religious images within the LDS church. This thesis does claim that the portraits have become religious iconology and sacred relics within the folk culture of Mormonism. Mormons both preserve the original intent of the portraits in their individual homes, and extend through their museums a folk-culture-

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rooted religious iconological use of the portraits. Therefore, in Mormon folk culture, the portraits are an expression of grass-roots collectivism.

Research for this thesis took place in the following facilities: Boise State

University, Idaho State University, the Denver Public Library Western

History/Genealogy Department, the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum, the Oneida

Pioneer Museum, Palace of the Governors Museum in Santa Fe, the Church of Jesus

Christ of Latter-day Saints History Museum, and the George Eastman House

International Museum of Photography and Film. Interviews with Mormons affiliated with various institutions have been recorded, as well as the thoughts of a few young people in their twenties, and one person who prefers to be known as a “recovering Mormon.” Grant

Romer, Conservator for the George Eastman House International Museum, an individual with perhaps more personal knowledge of the history of photography than any other living person, was gracious in sharing his knowledge and responses to this thesis in its earliest stage.

My quest has spanned twelve years, and is not yet complete. I acknowledge at the outset that questions will arise. Gaps exist. However, the photographic crayon portrait deserves the attention of both photography and art historians. Of this, there is certainty.

This thesis serves the purpose of bringing this remarkable photographic aesthetic into academic discourse—this is my comfort while facing the ever-present “I have more to learn” problem.

On that note, the references I have gathered throughout the course of twelve years are far too abundant for this thesis project. They are more useful in a dissertation or manuscript project. Understanding historical models is a newly developed skill through

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the mentorship of History Department professors at Boise State University. My sincere hope is that within the allotted time, I have gleaned for this project the best possible references to support this thesis. If not, the error lies in my editing, rather than in the support material. I am, however, confident that after reading this thesis, the reader will see the photographic crayon portrait—everywhere present in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century literature and photographs. However, nowhere will one find more photographic crayon portraits hanging in their original frames than in the Mormon country museums of Utah and Southeastern Idaho.

Mormon museums hold the best American collections of a historic and photographic iconography of common people: laborers and pioneers. Though I am not a

Mormon, I celebrate their collectivism through this significant visual element of their folk culture and iconology. And I thank the Mormon religious folk culture for inadvertently saving thousands of wonderful examples of the first suitable-for-framing

American portraits.

Terminology

The writing of this thesis has required a cross-disciplinary approach. Sources include works from linguistics, cultural history, art history, literature, theater, photography, and history of photography. Jargon and other burdensome concoctions became obstacles to overcome in the presentation of a coherent history.

Any unusual use of a word or any terminology more often associated specifically with one of the disciplines mentioned above is addressed as much as possible in the text.

There is every attempt to accomplish this without disrupting the fluidity of the concepts

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presented. Where this becomes problematic, any word or phrase that needs further clarification is underlined and can be found in the glossary. Where clarification is called for within the text, every consideration leans toward clarity for an audience of varied backgrounds.

Throughout the document, and sadly so, the photographic crayon portrait will be referred to in most cases as the “photo-portrait” for the sake of brevity. “Photo-portrait” was used in advertisements of the 1860s. Thus, in keeping with early practitioners, the

“photo-portrait” will substitute for the “photographic crayon portrait.” “Crayon” is used in this document for any crayon portrait that did not employ a photographic sketch. It should be noted that both photo-portraits and crayons of the type considered in this paper include a specific drawing technique, known as crayon portraiture or crayon drawing.

Also note that both photo-portraits and crayons are simply known as “crayon portraits” elsewhere, augmenting the confusion that surrounds this topic. Chapter one addresses this problem.

Class definitions are fraught with academic dangers. Yet, the reader will be ill- served if every time we need to discuss everybody but the independently wealthy and/or elite, we pause for some literary gyration that will still be doomed not to make every reader happy. Therefore, for the purpose of this paper, “working class” is unconventionally used here to define laborers—be they urban or rural—and even if they own their land, as homesteaders and farmers. Their incomes could not elevate them to independent wealth and an elite status. Yet some household comforts were attainable to them because of mass production and life-altering inventions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: steam engines, the telegraph, electricity, and the multifarious

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machinery and equipment these milestone inventions made possible. Consumers whose standard of living stood to benefit most from mass production were people who could not afford luxuries prior to the time when mass production brought the price of goods within the range of a laborer’s means. Even after industrialization, any luxuries the working class attained required financial sacrifice. For the purpose of this paper, the “working class” includes any laborer that worked full-time for a living and yet could not give a substantial inheritance to their heirs. They may have passed on a few sentimental heirlooms, perhaps a small sum of cash, or—if the situation allowed—a family farm or homestead.

Those considered self-made through entrepreneurial prowess, land holdings beyond the family farm, or as heirs of self-made people are part of the rising middle class. Two historic periods associated with the rise of the middle class are the development of a politically persuasive bourgeois in the late eighteenth-century Industrial

Revolution, and the cultural expansion of the middle class during the Victorian era.

Though these two groups held no titles of nobility, they nevertheless had the means to surround themselves with similar abundance in luxuries. These are the “middle class” for the purpose of this thesis.3

3 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp.24-5.

. . . life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable . . .With this chorus the profound Hellene, uniquely susceptible to the tenderest and deepest suffering, comforts himself . . . Art saves him, and through art—life. ~~Nietzche

All art is “image-making” and all image-making is rooted

in the creation of substitutes. ~~ Ernst Hans Gombrich

I: CRAYON PORTRAITURE AND THE “PHOTO-PORTRAIT”

Photographic crayon portrait (photo-portrait) is a type of crayon portrait

(crayons). Crayons are drawn with artists’ crayons. These are not the same as children’s crayons. The medium has changed little in over two hundred years, and existed in a variety of forms throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Artists’ pigments that are finely ground, then mixed with a binder such as wax, gum tragacanth, or clay, are pressed into a stick to form a crayon.1 Though the term “crayon portraiture” denotes a category of drawings made exclusively with crayons, other drawings called crayons would also fall into a broader category of composite drawings. Such crayons include

some use of charcoal, pastels or pen and ink. Further confounding

simple categorization, a crayon may include painterly applications

such as watercolor, or brush and ink wash. Emerging as a style of

artistic preparation for paintings toward the end of the

Renaissance, the earliest composite drawings were representational of the model and could stand alone today as an independent drawing.

The Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), prepared the drawing to the left for

1 Some dictionaries or encyclopedias describe the artists’ crayon as an umbrella term for all drawing mediums in stick form, including pastels and charcoals. Throughout this thesis the term applies only to the conte crayon, a pigment mixed with a binder. In this application, most often shades of black were used in order to blend with a photograph. Crayon portraits also vary with these varieties of materials. A monochromatic conte crayon portrait is the most prevalent of commercial aesthetics. This paper refers to typical portraits, rather than anomalies or those embellished with colors. A few encyclopedias and

the oil painting, Portrait of Isabella Brant, in 1626. Heribert Hutter provides this example in Drawing: History and Technique, and tells us that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drawing was “considered mainly as a preparation for the portrait and subordinated to it.” Later he states that by the end of the eighteenth century, portrait drawing, particularly in pastels, had grown in popularity as an art form independent of the traditional formal portrait made as an oil painting. 2

Portrait drawing and display grew in popularity as the bourgeois expanded in the late 1700s. In part, the new popularity of drawn portraiture was due to rapidly shifting cultural expressions influenced by the Industrial Revolution. Also responsible for an enthusiasm for self-portraiture was the optimistic social environment that industrial capitalism fostered. With the beginning of the Victorian era in 1837, the growth of a socially and culturally active middle-class advanced the demand for portraiture. If one was popular in a social circle, one’s portrait might be required for drawing room walls of several friends. Almost in step with the introduction of photography in 1839, crayon portraits had moved far from their Renaissance beginnings and into the category of

“popular art,” and illustration for the rising middle-class.3

Crayons were a less expensive means of portraiture, and required shorter sitting times than did oil paintings. Before the existence of photography, portraits were by necessity made from life. Only those with time, inclination and money would have one

dictionaries that do so are included in the bibliography under the heading of Reference Books.” These reference materials generally informed the author of any unusual terms and to prepare the glossary. 2 Heribert Hutter, Drawing: History and Technique (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968) Translated from the German Die Handzeichmung by D. J. S. Thomson. Page 64-5, and 106-10. 3 For a discussion on the use of art among the elite, and how that art becomes popular art as class shifts take place, see Herbert Read, Art and Society (New York: Schocken Books:1968) pp.66-73, and 115- 28. For information specifically relating to the Victorian middle-class, see Sachko Macleod, pp.20-4, 60- 74.

made, however abbreviated the sitting had become through the popularity of drawn portraiture. In this sense, although a growing art form, crayons did not become broadly dispersed among the masses. Portraiture was still an intimidating prospect, and either too ostentatious or too expensive for the majority of laborers. However, crayons did bring formal portraiture closer to the commercial market because of their relative informality compared to oil paintings. The popularity of the drawings also inadvertently provided a transition period between the Renaissance paintings and the photograph. People in general grew more accustomed to seeing drawings of rather ordinary individuals. Though elite to an extent in education, wealth or individual notoriety, the middle-class held no title of nobility, and were of low status in comparison to the Cardinals, Kings, Dukes and

Earls of late and post-Renaissance oil paintings.4

Popular art implies an aesthetic understood by most consumers. “Aesthetic” as used here means a group of design elements that evolved through practice to become the common visual elements of a given subject. The 1970s interior, for instance, will bring to mind dark, heavy Mediterranean furniture, loud colors in shag carpet, the swag lamp, harvest gold and avocado green linoleum floors and refrigerators, and so on. These are the aesthetics of the 1970s interior. The aesthetics of the crayon portrait drawing includes: usually a monochromatic image area; a life-sized bust in a vignette composition; a deep frame—usually oval; and a thick inner matt that separates the glass from the artwork. Crayons are still made today.

4 Hutter, Drawing, p.63-7.

The Photographic Sketch

The advent of photography in 1839 commercially overshadowed the popularity of the drawn portrait. Many artists took up the craft of photography in order to stay in business within the first decade of commercial photography.5 Photographs, however, had shortcomings where formal portraiture was concerned. One views a daguerreotype from directly in front of the object, and in most cases at arm’s length. The mirrored image disappears as the viewer changes position. The size of the daguerreotype makes it unsuitable for formal portraiture. A large daguerreotype is typically 6½ by 8½ inches.6

The surface can be easily marred when touched or rubbed. Therefore, they must remain protected from dust and dirt, and be kept in their case when not being viewed.

Additionally, daguerreotypes were expensive, but less so than a crayon. Consequently, the competition from daguerreotypy further drove down the cost of drawn portraiture.

The Victorian middle class, however, were much more attracted to the novelty and keepsake aspects of the smaller, shinier daguerreotypes made from nature.7 Crayonists and painters experienced progressively lower sales.

Not surprisingly, many artists pointed out the drawbacks of photography from artistic perspectives. One argument centered on the ability of the artist to capture and

5 Michel Frizot and Colin Harding, eds. A New History of Photography. English Language ed. (Italy: Könemann, 1998) pp.105-09. See also Marina Vaizey, The Artist as Photographer (New York: Hlt, Rinehart and Winston, A William Abrahams book, 1982) pp.50-52. 6 Southworth and Hawes Collection, 1840, Rare Manuscripts Collection, Richard and Ronay Menschel Library, the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, 1995. 7 For “nature” see Frizot and Harding, A New History of Photography, p.23. “Nature,” actually is an antiquated drawing term by the mid-1800s. Originally the term referred to drawing a live model in a studio. The term, however, was relegated early on as a descriptor for photographic image. For its use in the 1600s related to drawing a model see Hutter, Drawing, p.30. For information on the history of the daguerreotype see Frizot and Harding, p.51-7.

portray the essence of the human personality in a fashion that the lens could not.8 Another complaint, and valid for the artistic tastes of contemporaries, was that the camera showed everything in view of the lens. From corner to corner, the entire setting was evident. This distracted from the subject. Artists of crayon portraits composed the bust of the sitter in a pleasing vignette composition that faded away beneath the shoulders, and from behind the head toward the corners. In 1848 a Bostonian named J.A. Whipple, Esquire, invented the vignette machine. This device enabled the photographer to create the same vignettes as a crayonist, as previously described. The improvement to the daguerreotype was known as the “crayon daguerreotype,” 9 because it enabled the photographer to restrict the image to the head, as crayonists did in artistic crayon drawings. No crayon application was imposed on the daguerreotype via drawing, as might be suggested by the name.

Daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and albumen prints—all which predate the photo- portrait—are often graced with beautiful vignettes that were created with Whipple’s invention, or similar apparatuses. Once the vignette was introduced to photography, photographers soon became creative about manufacturing their own means of applying the treatment.10 What is most important to note about the vignette is that it shows that photographers attempted to emulate traditional drawing composition.

8 J. Warring Wilkinson, “Our Art Possibilities,” The Overland Monthly, Vol. 2, No.3 (March, 1869) p.253. 9 Henry H. Snelling, The History and Practice of the Art of Photography, or The Production of Pictures Through the Agency of Light, Containing All the Instructions necessary for the Complete practice of the Daguerrean and Photogenic Art, Both on Metalic Plates and on Paper: The First Bound Treatise on Photography Ever Published in America (Originally Printed in 1849 New York: G. P. Putnam, 1849. Reprint, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York: Morgan & Morgan, Inc., 1970) pp.120-21. This invention was collaboration. Whipple is credited with invention, and M. A. Root is credited as the patentee. 10 J.Towler M.D., The Silver Sunbeam: A Practical and Theoretical Text-book on Sun Drawing and Photographic Printing: Comprehending All the Wet and Dry Processes at Present Known, with Collodion, Albumen, Gelatin, Wax, Resin, and Silver; as also Heliographic Engraving, Photolithography, Photozincography, Celestial Photography, Photography in Natural Colors, Tinting and Coloring of Photographs, Printing in Various Colors; the Carbon Process, the Card-Picture, the Vignette, and

Sad to say, however lovely the vignette might have been on these early photographs, the following decade saw photographs that remained limited in size.

Cameras that were capable of making multiple proofs on one glass negative, and the ability to print on paper using a negative, allowed the use of less expensive materials with greater reproduction capabilities. Fast and small prints became the rage of the 1850s for both consumers and photographers. Porcelain miniatures and postage stamp photographs became big business. Collecting images of friends and famous people became quite popular. After all, once a person had one photograph of themselves, how else could the photographer retain the client’s business?

The “calling card” or “visiting card” photograph was the perfect answer : the carte de visite. To collect the images of friends and celebrities was a popular pastime in the 1860s. Mass production albums allowed individuals to collect their entire social entourage. Friends became socially obliged to make many images of themselves in order to share with photo-ravenous friends upon whom they called. One advertiser in New

York produced album pages for eighteen one-inch postage stamp images.11

In 1857, the veritable heyday of itty-bitty pictures, David Acheson Woodward invented the Woodward Solar Enlarging Camera. At the time he was a portrait painter who was employed as a drawing instructor at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. His intent was to use his camera to project images onto canvas as preliminary sketches for formal paintings.12 With this camera a photographer could take a small image, even a

Stereography (New York: Joseph H. Ladd, 1864. Reprint, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York: Morgan & Morgan, Inc., 1969) p.223. 11 New York Times 8 May, 1864. 12 Jack Wilgus, “Professor Woodward: Pioneer Photographic Inventor and Educator,” Bright Bytes of Maryland Institute College of Art. [article on-line] Available from http://brightbytes.com/woodward.html. Internet; accessed 23 October, 2005.

postage stamp photo, and enlarge the portrait from the original button-sized head to life- sized.13

Source: Jack Wilgus “Professor Woodward.”

The solar camera made possible the first commercial photographic life-sized images of humans.14 An original photograph produced by any of the previously mentioned processes was required. The apparatus made strictly copy enlargements. The drawback to the first solar-enlarged copies was that the prints were faint. Their low- contrast was due both to the general low-contrast nature of salted paper,15 and to the weak application of light through the apparatus. The light-sensitive paper on which the print was made would be pinned to the projection easel, as is shown in the advertisement. The camera projected the image onto the paper. After the exposure, the salted paper print was processed in similar fashion to modern darkroom techniques. The solar enlarging camera

13 Dude! Are you serious? 14 Wilgus, “Professor Woodward.” 15 James M.Reilly, The Albumen & Salted Paper Book (Rochester, Light Impressions Incorporation, 1980) pp.68-9.

had a set of gears that allowed the camera to compensate for the rotation of the earth throughout the day, allowing for the longest possible use of sunlight.

Though salted paper prints were typically faint and low-contrast, those from the solar enlarger were especially so. The particularly faint image was problematic. Perhaps the solar camera would have been scrapped altogether for commercial photographers’ use had not an ingenious crayonist decide to treat one of the prints as a sketch, or as a study, for a drawn crayon portrait. The hybrid results showed great promise for the market by introducing distinct and frame-worthy commercial photographic portraiture that looked like artistic drawings. The reduced work of the crayonist could mean reduced rates for the consumer, a mutually beneficial situation. The artists-turned-photographers could now bring their first love back into their business . . . the art of portrait drawing.

Woodward and his patent partner, M. A. Root, however, apparently were somewhat unpopular with an influential author and editor of photographic publications,

John Towler, M.D. In The Silver Sunbeam, A Practical and Theoretical Text-Book on

Sun Drawing and Photographic Processes . . . , written in 1864, Towler never mentioned

Woodward or Root by name. He did, however, mention the name of other inventors of apparatuses or processes in his book. Of Woodward and Root he wrote:

These appendages to the solar camera and the solar microscope are fac-similes of each other; but the solar microscope existed before photography had been elicited from chaos; the solar camera, therefore, is mere imitation of its antecedent; the patentees of the latter instrument, then, can make no claim to originality of design; their only claim can be the application of the instrument to photography.

Towler was an influential figure in the literary world that concerned itself with photography. The Silver Sunbeam was destined to be read by most contemporary photographers. He was editor of one of the great nineteenth-century journals devoted to

the craft, Humphrey’s Journal of Photography. Perhaps his lack of endorsement led to some of the snobbery against the photo-portrait discussed in chapter two. At any rate, this was only the beginning of “bad-rap to no-rap-at-all” for the photo-portrait.

Woodward may have been the first person to use the enlargement as a photographic sketch from which to finish a crayon portrait. However, he was not known as a crayonist, and examples of his painted photo-portraits still demonstrate his interest along those lines.16 The area to cover on the enlarged print is too large for touch-up techniques—making such a venture seem too much of a leap for the photographer who was not a crayonist as well. Crayon drawing requires mastery of artists’ materials and rendition. Many photographers, as stated earlier, came from the crayonist tradition. Only a small leap from Woodward’s painting experiments was required. Alternatively, perhaps a crayonist saw a demonstration of the capability of the solar camera and made the leap on his own.

In 1860, Woodward traveled to London and publicized his invention. While there, he also demonstrated the camera to the famous photographer Antoine Claudet. According to Jack Wilgus, of the Maryland Institute, Claudet said of the camera that this is “ . . . one of the most important improvements introduced into the art of photography.”17 However,

Claudet is not known for making photo-portraits. Perhaps the most important conclusion that can be drawn from this statement is that the commercial venue had not yet begun by

1860; Claudet would have surely been familiar with the photo-portrait prior to

Woodward’s visit if they were already commercially available and advertised.

16 Wilgus, “Professor Woodward.” 17 Wilgus, “Professor Woodward.”

The earliest mention this researcher found of a crayonist working on a photographic sketch is in January of 1862. A letter from George Du Maurier, illustrator of Punch, scribed to a fellow artist describes a visit he made to the studio of the Pre-

Raphaelite crayonist, Frederick Sandys. The fellowship of the Pre-Raphaelites was based in England, and Frederick Sandys was British. Du Maurier wrote:

. . . He showed me two crayon portraits he is doing, the finest of the sort I ever saw, and as for his studies they are wonderful. If he has a patch of grass to do in a cut, an inch square, he makes a large and highly finished study from nature for it first; tu conçois qu’un gaillard pareil ira loin; he has work on hand for two years, after which he will go abroad. . . .18

We can safely presume Sandys was using a photographic sketch, though he referred to it as a “highly finished study.” Clues to this include the “cut,” “an inch square,” and “from nature.” The most telling phrase is the latter. In the early days of photography, artists and photographers differentiated between their products along nature versus artist themes: the daguerreotype was called “the mirror of nature,” Fox Talbot’s book was the Pencil of Nature, “photogenic drawing,” or “light drawing,” was later replaced with “photography.” Towler instructed his students that controlling the light in the studio was an art, “ . . . whereby nature becomes natural.” Too numerous are the examples to mention here.

Du Maurier was well connected in the art world, and was writing to a fellow artist.

There would have been no need for description of a two hundred year old process with which they were both intimately familiar. Moreover, he could safely assume his reference to “nature” would cause his friend to think of the photograph. Du Maurier’s reference to

“cut” and “an inch square” may reflect his own amazement at being able to extract from an original image what is now called a “crop.” Only one small portion was needed to enlarge through the solar camera in order to produce and entirely new and different image. Provided below is a sample of an original photograph and the photo-portrait later made of such a “cut” Du Maurier may have witnessed. This new twist, a hybrid photograph/drawing from the solar enlarging camera was difficult to describe to people still grasping for reasonable descriptors for photographic imagery. The photo-portrait proved to be verbally stupefying.

Jane Emma Merrifield Williams, photographer unknown. Crayon portrait courtesy of the Oneida Pioneer Museum, Malad City Idaho. 1890 (?). Original image courtesy Carolyn Barnes, Malad City, Idaho. 1885(?).

18 Daphne Du Maurier, editor, The Young George Du Maurier (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1952) p.99. For a biographical sketch of Sandys and his artwork, see Christopher Neve, “The Woman-Goddess as Seen by Sandys,” Country Life, (May 23, 1974) pp.1268-1269

If these clues leave the reader in doubt that Du Maurier is speaking of photographs as studies, consider the side comment made in French, which translates

“You can imagine that a similarly sly devil will go far!” With what? The crayon portrait was well-respected, but it was old news. Such speculation again points to the revelation of the photographic sketch being observed and described for the first time by Du Maurier.

The marriage of the crayon and the photograph from Woodward’s invention may have taken place across the pond. Perhaps the Pre-Raphaelites in London are to be thanked.19 Perhaps Sandys or one of his Pre-Raphaelian brethren were the first to hybridize photographic crayon portraiture. The point here is that Sandys experimented with, or crayoned over a photographic sketch in 1861—if other crayonists used a photographic sketch this early, they have yet to be identified. Within a few years, the procedure grew into a familiar aesthetic throughout most of the United States and territories as the “photo-portrait.” Other names include any combination of the words: solar, enlargements, crayon, photo, portrait, and so forth. For instance, Denver advertisements referred to them as “photo crayons” in the 1870s.20 Yet, no matter what they were called, most advertisements give a thorough description of the medium, making sure to include “life-sized.”

19 Wilgus, “Professor Woodward.” For Sandys’ British connection see Herbert Read, ed., The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists Revised, Expanded and Updated Edition (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1994) p.323. For another reference regarding the use of “nature” as meaning a living sitter in the studio, see Henry H. Snelling, The History and Practice of the Art of Photography (Hastings-on-Hudson, New York: Moran & Morgan, Inc., 1970) p.131. 20 The Denver Post, Source clipped from headings. n.d.. 1869(?). Perry & Bohm Studio ran the advertisement. These photographers advertised “Crayon Portraits” on the backs of their stereographs 1872- 5. See “Photograph Archives,” Pikes Peak Library District http://www.ppld.org/specialcollections/Project/admin/PhotoSearch.asp?fields=Creator&terms=Perry%20& %20Bohm

In Chicago, the earliest advertised name for them was the “photo-portrait.” An advertising war broke out in The Chicago Tribune early in 1869 between the Brand

Studio and the Fassett’s Studio. The Brand studio aligned itself with the Masonic lodges, renaming the studio the “Temple of Art.” During the retortus Brand reminded the patrons that he “introduced the Photo-Portrait” in Chicago.21 A similar advertising war appeared in Iowa’s Boone County Republican in 1876. On May 24, a photographer reminds the community that he owned the patent in the valley for photo-portraits, which he fully described. He asserted that “ . . . Any person having any of the above pictures taken after the publication of this notice, lay themselves liable to prosecution to the full extent of the law . . ..”22 The advertisements confirm that the photo-portrait enjoyed as great a success as other nineteenth-century photographic processes. Photographers were eager to keep their photo-portrait clientele.

By the 1880s many advertisements used the term ”crayon portrait,” rather than photo-portrait. Because from that point forward they were identified using the same terms as the non-photographic variety, sorting a reference to one from the other becomes problematic. Therefore, exploring how artists and the elite viewed the original crayon, versus how they viewed the photographic crayon, helps to clarify which variety is being referred to in literary works after the 1880s. The photo-portrait, by many other names, enjoyed commercial success from the mid-1860s through approximately 1910. Once the

Flappers graced the scene, the “ugly goons of the nineteenth century”23 came off the wall

21 The Chicago Tribune. 30 January, 1869-11 April, 1869. 22 Mary Bennet and Paul C. Juhl, Iowa Stereographs: Three-Dimensional Visions of the Past (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1997) p.59. 23 Interview with Grant Romer, by the author, transcribed notes from telephone recording, 11 December, 2002.

throughout America with the exception of traditional family farms of the plains, and in the Mormon country of Utah and Southern Idaho.

Concluding Chapter I

The crayon portrait is a traditional and technical drawing technique that evolved as finished portraits throughout the 1700s. Sometime between 1860 and 1861, crayonists experimented with drawing on and framing enlarged photographic prints made with the

Woodward Solar Enlarging Camera. They called the photographic print a “photographic sketch.” The result was the photographic crayon portrait, a commercial aesthetic that is a hybrid of photography and crayon drawing.

The photographic sketch drastically reduced the time required to make a crayon portrait. This allowed artists to produce them at a rapid pace, without ever seeing the model. In the 1860s, the production of these required a photographer’s studio that was equipped with stationary solar enlarging cameras on the roof or in a specially prepared outdoor enlarging yard or garden.24

Photographic crayon portraits looked similar to each other due to the crayon artwork, size, the vignette composition, a think inner matt to hold the glass away from the crayon powders, and a hefty ornate frame. They only vary in appearances according to the contrast of the photographic print, the drawing medium selected and the skill of the individual artist.

While photo-portraits were not the first photographic enlargements, they were the first to be life-sized, and the first to be commercially competitive. Including more

illustrations and discussing the technical aspects of these enlargements is necessary for further exploration and interpretation within the technical history of photography.

However, chapter one has served to introduce the photographic crayon portrait, or photo- portrait, and the crayon and crayonists, to readers who are not familiar with the artifacts, their history and terminology. The following chapters will explore cultural responses to photo-portraits. Most important to this exploration are those responses that remain vibrant in Mormon folk culture today.

24 See Appendix, Figure 1.

II: CULTURAL RESPONSE AND IMPLICATIONS

Because photographic crayon portraits and crayons are both known as “crayon portraits” from the mid 1870s until the current day, understanding the context within which one is mentioned will provide clues to which variety is the subject of a given reference. Studying the sentiments of critics and consumers of the crayon portrait before and after the photographic sketch appeared will help readers draw useful conclusions.

While this method presents a pitfall—that anomalies exist—the following sections will provide ample material from which to gain reasonable assurances.

In addition, this chapter will suggest possible reasons why the photo-portrait has been left out of photo-history timelines and interpretations. The invention of the sewing machine was included on a history of photography timeline where the photographic crayon portrait was left off.25 This seems odd, especially when considering the portraits may have been in more homes than the sewing machine was, both across the country, and throughout the world. The following sections will demonstrate their prevalence to an exceptional extent in American homes. So familiar were they, that they entered the vernacular as metaphor in literary works. No other photographic process in American history shares this place—that of labeling the working class by its presence. Nor have other photographs demonstrated the same memorial qualities as these. Once these issues

25 Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, Revised edition. (New York:

are addressed, the foundation is laid not only for a reasonable discourse concerning photo-portraiture, but for discussing the portraits as a grassroots Mormon embodiment of religious iconology.

Artists and Photographers: Drawing the Class Lines

Prior to the photo-portrait, when crayons or crayonists were discussed in text, the protagonists were generally wealthy or at least accepted among the wealthy for exceptional talent or intellect. Excerpts from the letters of Charles Eliot Norton, the apex of Boston’s aristocratic clergy, included reference to Samuel W. Rowse, “master of crayon portraits,”26 among others who frequented Norton’s summer home in Newport.

Norton noted that Rowes drew one of the finest crayons of Ralph Waldo Emerson.27

Consider how the following passage implies that being a crayonist was an element of the well-rounded bourgeoisie:

Francis Hopkinson (1737-91) . . . conspicuous among Revolutionary writers, and deserves it for his versatility, . . . signed the Declaration of Independence and helped to make it effective by such performances as A Pretty Story and The Political Catechism. But while interest attaches to his career as well as to that of his father, Thomas, who helped Franklin to study electricity, and of his son, Joseph (1770-1842), who wrote the popular lyric “Hail Columbia” (1798), it may not be heretical to declare that the judge with the head “not bigger than a large apple,” who composed music for his own songs, played the harpsichord, and drew crayon portraits of “reigning belles,” is of more consequence as a pleasant figure in a contentious epoch than as the author of the three

Abbeville Press, 1989) p.618. Rosenblum is not to blame, and I hesitate to use this example, yet, the absence of the photographic crayon portrait in all of the history of photography is as pervasive as this example suggests. 26 Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, biographers. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton with Biographical Comment (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1913) p.86. 27 Ibid., p86. See also, F. B. Sanborn, “The Portraits of Emerson,” New England Magazine, Vol. 21, issue 4 (December, 1869) p.456.

volumes of his “Works” that were published in his native Philadelphia the year after his death.28

Caroline Negus Hildreth, using her talent as a crayonist, provided the sole financial support of her husband, Richard, for eight years of research and writing.

Richard Hildreth’s three volume History of the United States of America, “ . . . might never have appeared . . .”29 had it not been for Caroline’s “remunerative sittings . . . ” according to Donald E. Emerson, in Richard Hildreth. Her studio was in the back of their home. Among her many well-known sitters was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who mentions her in his published letters. Her crayons brought her a considerable degree of regional admiration and fame.

Richard Hildreth, c 1849, by Caroline Hildreth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1858, by Samuel W. Rowes 30 Distinctly different artistic approaches are evident. Both crayon portraits of the kind popular among the Bourgeois of the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian middle class from the mid-1700s through the 1880s.

28 William P. Trent, M. A., LL. D., A History of American Literature: 1607-1865 (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1920) p.156. 29 Donald E. Emerson, Richard Hildreth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1946) p.127. 30 The drawing of Hildreth is assumed to be made by Caroline Negus Hildreth, and can be found at the following: “Notable American Unitarians: 1740-1900,” Harvard Square Library, Unitarianism in America Online, http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/UIA%20Online/index.html. Samuel W. Rowse, who is highly spoken of in the letters of Charles Eliot Norton, drew Emerson’s image. See also William Roscoe Thayer, ed., Letters of John Holmes to James Russell Lowell and Others (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917) p.98.

Towler, 1864, just before the photographic sketch came fully to the attention of photographers across the continent, revealed the class-consciousness of his day, and placed the artist with the elite, when he stated, “The qualifications of an artist are very distinct from those of a mere operator; the former, by reason of his qualifications, can associate with gentlemen and the intelligent; the latter can aspire to no higher companionship than with the ignorant and vulgar.”31 Passages such as these show that artists of the drawn crayon portrait pre-dating the photographic sketch were approved of by the elite. Towler’s remarks go one step beyond by showing some early signs of excluding from association with the elite photographers whose introduction to art or drawing may have come later through the photographic sketch.

One encounters more difficulty finding a disparaging word regarding crayon portrait artists prior to the photographic sketch. When crayonists were discussed, as in these examples, they were universally admired. They hobnobbed with the rich and famous. As Towler points out, their qualifications secured their place within the upper social circles—regardless of financial status. Countless crayons parade from these circles.

For over one hundred years, almost anybody who was anybody made sure to have at least one crayon drawn. Emerson, as one example, had many of them made. He used them as gifts, or for his various publications.32

The crayonist that made use of the photographic sketch, however, soon suffered a cold shoulder in those same circles. Even an otherwise qualified artist was disqualified if

31 Towler, The Silver Sunbeam, p.27. In this case, as Towler is writing as a photographer, who was an artist and added photography to his skills, a “mere operator” is a photographer who was not first an artist. 32 Sanborn, “The Portraits of Emerson,” pp.449-68. This article shows roughly twenty crayon and photographic crayon portraits of Emerson. Along with the portraits are stories of Emerson’s social visits, the making of the portraits, and how they were used.

he indulged the practice for long. The most severe critics of early photography were painters. Artists made known their opinions about the inability of the camera to do anything more for art than stenographers did for literature;33 yet painters, ironically, routinely used photographs as a mock up for a painting. Marina Vaizey, in The Artist as

Photographer, provides many examples of early photographs, and the paintings made from them.34 Vaizey’s thorough research shows artists of every caliber embracing photography as a means of preparation for painting. In many cases, the photograph is used much like the preliminary drawings of the Renaissance painters. The photographs could stand alone, but were put away by the artist once the painting was completed.

Vaizey points out that the “nature of the embrace varied: for some it was secret, almost shameful.”35 Vaizey concludes, however, that “for good or ill,” photography became part of “nearly every artist’s armory: for documentation, reportage, visual source, and working tool—valued alike for professional interest, and for private pleasure.”36

To understand the sentiments of artists and elites before the photographic sketch was introduced is useful for knowing when the photographic sketch is being referred to as a “crayon portrait.” By comparing and contrasting messages that filter through various cultural sources, it becomes apparent that the photo-portrait was rejected by the elite as a low-class vulgar attempt at art while the photo-portrait was completely embraced by

American laborers and pioneers of the West. In this sense, the photographic crayon portrait can be described as the first truly American pop-culture portrait aesthetic.

33 Giséle Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: David R. Godine, Inc., 1980) p.79 34 Marina Vaizey, The Artist as Photographer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982) pp.12, 21, 24, 35, 36, 40, and 46-7. 35 Vaizey, Artist p.52. 36 Vaizey, Artist p.52.

Laborers and Pioneers: Class and Consumer Viewed in Metaphor, Innuendo, Sarcasm and Snobbery

To many who know nothing about the art of crayon portraiture, the mastery of it not only seems very difficult, but almost unattainable. In fact, any work of art of whatever description, which in its execution is beyond the knowledge or comprehension of the spectator, is to him a thing of almost supernatural character. Of course, this is more decided when the subject portrayed caries our thoughts beyond the realms of visible things. 37 ~ J. A. Barhydt

The Chicago Tribune, 3 January, 1869.

Front page. The advertisement above reads:

What brings to mind the lost and gone more forcibly than the late holiday festivities? Before another Fireside Gathering have the smiling faces of the lost ones looking down from the homestead walls, even though their bodily presence shall be wanting.

37 J.A. Barhydt, Crayon Portraiture: Complete Instructions for Making Crayon Portraits on Crayon Paper and on Platinum, Silver and Bromide Enlargements: and Directions for the Use of Transparent Liquid Water Colors: and for Making French Crystals, Revised and enlarged edition (New York:: The Baker & Taylor CO., 1890) p.15.

Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, in Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature, explores the history of ideas regarding loneliness and the individual mind. The basic agreement of philosophers from Plato to Kant is that loneliness is our greatest fear; so much so that loneliness is masked and compensated for intuitively long before it is experienced. He concludes:

For the Sophists, although there is no truth, still there is persuasion, albeit itself based on deception. Much—but certainly not everything—is fair in the pursuit of individual happiness and the flight from loneliness. And so we may be permitted, and forgiven, if we indulge in some sophistry and self-deception on our selves.38

Loss through the death of loved-ones or trail-mates, loneliness and physical hardship, longing for family they have departed from—in the East or in another homeland country: these are the recurring themes of pioneer journals. This section of chapter two explores the role of the photo-portrait in the lives of pioneers and Mormons, but more generally in the lives of the working class at large. Perpetuating relationships with the dead through portraiture was an expression of the collective conscious and was accomplished through “self-deception” in both the “pursuit of happiness” and the “flight from loneliness.” Note that the advertisement insinuated a living essence of the deceased in their “smiling faces” and eyes that “look down” from the wall. The Brand Studio in

Chicago understood that the photo-portrait could be used as a great comfort in many of the Western homesteads. Advertisements such as this one were highly successful at marketing photo-portraits to homesteaders.

38 Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (Assen, The Netherlands: Van-Gorcum & Comp., 1979) p.100.

Consider, for a moment, attempting to target the same market with self-portraits, rather than with the portraits of lost loved-ones. Homesteading pioneers were forced to make do with little or no luxury and little or no daily companionship—many supported themselves solely on a barter system until the completion of the railroad.39 It is safe to presume that these individuals would simply pass up the great expense to replicate the self, that is, themselves as the “smiling face” with whom to share meals on prairie homesteads.

Having a formal portrait of oneself as the only artwork on the wall is a convention that most likely will never occur in the lower income masses of humanity. For the purpose of this thesis, the exceptionally rich and powerful are considered anomalies where portraiture is concerned. Among the poorest of people who do have walls, if only one or two images are displayed, they are usually representative of a religious faith, a pastoral art reproduction, heroic figures, or their children. But consider for a moment the wall of a provincial plains home of the Great Depression alongside the modern provincial

Ohio home (on the following page).

Though this February’s National Geographic image includes wedding photographs of the Ohio couple, and many of the wedding photographs of their twenty children, all of the photographs in the room would nevertheless be considered “keepsake portraits.” After one hundred and sixty years of photographic opportunity, there is no formal portrait of either of these individuals’ parents nor grandparents on the wall. There are religious figures that are important to them. Could this suggest that the working class

39 The Salt Lake City Desert Evening News 5 September, 1860. This territory of Utah and Southern Idaho were beyond the boundaries of the U.S. currency exchange system. Paper money was worthless in the earliest years until territorial status was granted. The Mormons continued their barter system for many

has resumed the non-formal-portrait traditions that pre-dated the photographic crayon portrait, when only the elite had formal portraits made? or are the changes in how we relate to our ancestors? or both?

Photograph by Jodi Cobb, National Geographic. February, 2006. P.46-47

On nineteenth-century homesteads, when one member passed away they were memorialized through the photo-portrait, and included henceforth in family portraits whenever possible through the iconography of their image. The following examples are typical of how photo-portraits were used as icons of missing family members in group portraits; either the portraits were brought to the studio for the family portrait, or the

years as self-and-neighborly-support became a part of their church structure when settling the Salt Lake Basin.

family gathered around the portraits in the home. One example shows the portrait was taken to the front lawn to be included in the group photograph. Another shows the photo- portrait was pinned to the tent wall behind the family.

Image of Nebraska homesteaders’ on front lawn. Matron is in photographic crayon next to her husband, the children are with him, the farm hands in the back row. Image 1903, reprinted from Hans Halberstadt’s, The American Family Farm, 1996. p.X.

From Life photographer, Nina Leen in 1934. Iowa settlers’ children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren gather under four pioneer ancestors in photographic crayons during the Great Depression. Edward Steichen, Family of Man, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art. 1955. p59.

Walter Richthofen brought his deceased mother’s photo-portrait to the itinerant photographer’s tent in order to include her in a family photograph. She is attached to the cloth wall behind Walter, who is just to the right in front of her. Courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History/Geneology Department. 1895(?).

Early Mormon women—officials of the church Relief Society—bring deceased member of their organization in photographic crayon to their group portrait. Courtesy of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Modern researchers should guard against transferring their own personal comfort with photographic images to their mid-nineteenth-century subjects. Through the ensuing years the photograph has been demystified, especially through the moving image. Group photographs like these begin to evoke a deeper metaphorical relationship to the deceased persona through their photo-portrait. Samples such as these are found throughout the

United States, indicating that such portraits met the needs of grieving individuals wherever they lived.

However, one would be wrong to assume that the norm of the proxy portrait, and the photo-portraits themselves, existed only in America or were only of the dead. Who can forget the massive communist parades in Europe and China with every marcher waiving photo-portraits of their living leaders? The portrait spread across Europe, to

Australia, and into the Orient and India, and in served similar purposes as in America. 40

One nineteenth-century charitable worker made such an America-centric assumption while gathering information regarding the charitable needs of immigrants from Slavic countries to the “mining patch” settlements near Punxsutawny, Pennsylvania.

She thoroughly explored every detail of the immigrants’ homes and lifestyles. She made note of the “gaudy colored prints of sacred objects in cheap frames,” the “much-washed lace curtains,” and the handmade laces that “lie on cheap shellacked sideboards.” She concluded, ”Everything is spotless, and if the invading Americanism shows itself in hideous bric-a-brac and crayon portraits of members of the family, it at least speaks of hope, movement and purpose.”41 Indeed, the crayon portrait spoke of hope—as it was represented through the memorial act to themes of life after death. This adds a culture- based metaphorical dimension to this expression of mourners for deceased persons who held no advanced rank in society.

40 Grant Romer, Director of Photographs Conservation, The George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. Interview by author, 11 December, 2002, Rochester, New York, taped phone call, Silver X Photographic Conservation, Hagerman, Idaho. 41 Emily Green Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens ( New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910, Additional note of the press as follows: Philadelphia: Press of Wm. F. Fell, Co., 1910) p.372. Here the concept of the religious images alongside the photo-portraits of parents or grandparents is discussed from the perspective of a charitable worker who visited their homes Slavic immigrants to assess their needs. She described their interiors in detail. The reproduction of the deceased through the photographic crayon portrait appealed to new immigrants as readily as it did to Pioneers from the United States, as a means of perpetuating life with missing family members, departed or permanently separated from.

Though the ranks of nobility may no longer be applied to nineteenth-century society, the non-ranking individual was, and is, perpetuated yet today. Mostly, the modern individual of the working class still forgoes formal portraiture of the self. Yet, the

Everyman “talking head” theme persists for the deliverance of any individual from their misery; they are found in books and movies such as Robert Zemeckis’ 2000 film Cast

Away. Chuck Nolan, played by Tom Hanks, is washed ashore on an uninhabited Pacific

Island after the FedEx® plane he was a passenger on goes down at sea. After a few days of trauma, thirst, hunger and feeble attempts to leave the island, he breaks down in desperation and opens all but one of the packages that washed ashore hoping to find anything that will help him to either survive or signal for help. One of the packages contains a volleyball, a striking reminder of being alone and isolated. Nolan bloodies his hands in attempt to make a fire using a crude hand drill method—he loses his composure—picks up and throws the volleyball into the rocks. He returns to find that the bloodied handprint looks like a head with hair. He rubs some of the blood away. First from the valve—a naval or a nose? Then, eyes. A thin line with an upward tilt at one end, and voila!—a face is born. He then returns to fire-making. He eyes the new face self- consciously as he continues his effort.

“Wouldn’t happen to have a match by any chance?” He breaks the ice with the new guy. The face looks like a head with flames coming out of the top. Nolan is suddenly, after two days of struggle, successful at his fire. His act of making and speaking to the face, followed by successfully making fire, is the birthplace of sympathetic ritual and magic. The tradition in humans stems from making the physical objects, noting the consequences (successful fire) and repeating the circumstance as ritual

in order to systematically produce the same positive events again.42 The ball is now a friend, as a face is a person in our cultural metonymies.43 Nolan calls him “Wilson.”

Wilson becomes an emotional partner in Nolan’s misery. Nolan is thus spared the insanity and torture that loneliness may have brought him. The choice of a volleyball, and the handprint, are brilliant in many respects, but beyond the purview of this endeavor to further pursue.

What is important about Wilson, is that he is what a photo-portrait was to a lonely pioneer in a sod house. More importantly, he, and they, represent life. The extra power the photo-portrait carries is its connection to the hereafter. The photo-portrait reunited one with an other after death. Wilson’s voice was nothing more than Nolan’s own. A photo-portrait could be imagined to speak in the voice of the deceased loved one.

J.K. Rowling’s, Harry Potter offers the ultimate experience in companion portraiture—the protagonists are actually alive in the portraits, and if they choose, can and do interact with viewers.44 The photo-portrait surrounded in an ornately decorated gilt frame in a clapboard house, a log cabin, or sod house could have had much the same effect. To many Victorians, photography was a kind of magic, or parlor trick.45

Advertisements showed little devils climbing all over the camera. Photo-portraits appeared to the nineteenth-century individual much in the same way that Potter’s portraits appear to modern day movie viewers—after a century of watching moving images. The nineteenth-century gazer-of-photo-portraits might almost expect the departed to speak through the portrait at any moment. Photo-portraits thus brought to life

42 Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp.11-22. 43 George Lackoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) p.37. 44 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (New York: Scholastic Inc., 1999) p.83.

the deceased to the nineteenth-century mourner. The palpable presence of the deceased was striking to viewers in the first decades of the photo-portrait. Pioneers, whose lives were as adventuresome as they were isolated, might even experience an altered consciousness upon encountering one of the portraits unexpectedly. In the following poem, the conscience of a wayward Mormon pioneer is piqued upon seeing his mother’s portrait on the wall in one of her friend’s homes.

Only a Picture

It was only a picture that hung on the wall, It was only a picture, you see. That changed my poor wretched life to some good, Just the picture of mother of me...... For years I have gambled and drunk a good deal, And done other bad things for a fee. When I spied one night, in the house of a friend, The sweet picture of mother of me. At first I could scarcely believe my own eyes, And I felt as ashamed as could be, For I knew I wasn’t half worthy to gaze On the picture of mother of me. Her eyes seemed so sad, and her lips seemed to move, As if pleading more worthy I’d be, And right there I swore that I’d change my rough course, By the picture of mother of me...... And the years now have passed, and I’ve not worked in vain— But, dear mother, ‘twas only through thee That my life has been changed to real usefulness— Through your picture, of mother of me!46

The portraits introduced many pioneer children to their grandparents. The following poem appears with the personal histories of the children and grandchildren of pioneers. The collection was compiled in the 1940s to honor the history of the Utah

45 Frizot and Harding, A New History, p.103-04.

pioneers of the Mormon Church. The “war” that is spoken of in this poem may be the

“Utah War” against the United States in 1857.47

To My Grandmother’s Portrait

You’re nothing but a picture on the wall Yet your young, serious lips and eyes are all The grandma I have ever had. You know Before I came here, you were called to go. But lots of times when I’m alone, I play That you, O Lady of Bygone Day, Are still alive to wear your long black frock Of taffeta, that rustles when you walk And wafts a subtle scent of wild rose leaves— A scent so delicate it almost grieves— Dried in a tiny, painted china jar Grandfather gave you when he went to war— I’m sure, if you should call some bright spring day, That I should know you, and I’d smile and say “Grandmother dear, why did you leave so soon? (Yes, isn’t it a lovely afternoon?) Won’t you sit down? Take off your bonnet too, I’m Bessie’s oldest daughter. How are you?”48

Much later, in 1927, Mari Sandoz wrote a short story based on her earlier experiences as a homesteader’s wife in Nebraska. Her main character, Meda, was so lonely for companionship in her tiny sod house that she longed for her Indiana

46 Kate B. Carter, comp, Heart Throbs of the West:“A Unique Volume Treating Definite Subjects of Western History,” Volume Nine (Salt Lake City: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, 1948) Poem contributed by Mrs. Ida R. Aldredge, p.150. 47 Donald R. Moorman with Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992) p.20-21. War was declared by Brigham Young on July 26, 1857 in the Tabernacle. “ . . . overnight the muster rolls of the Nauvoo Legion swelled from several hundred volunteers to a force of more than five thousand men.” 48 Carter, Heart Throbs. p.141. In this volume, oral histories are recorded as individuals look through old family albums. Some of the memorabilia in the albums point more to the walled portraits, such as poems. Because the interviews are conducted with a family photograph album in order to prompt the memories of the interviewees, my reliance must be on other descriptors of walled portraits of deceased individuals along with other clues regarding the period they were on the wall.

neighborhood. Her husband “ . . . made light over the rivalry of neighbors over the parlor sets and crayon portraits.” She, however, “doted on these pastimes.”49

In a remote area of the prairie, Meda would have been unable to obtain portraits.

Meda’s suffering from lack of companionship is transferred to a vine that she secretly keeps watered through a draught, a metaphor for friendship. Her husband refuses her the water, and she becomes abstractly ill at ease. She falls into insanity when her vine dies.

Those who had photo-portraits could remain in touch using a positive self-deception through the “other,” just as Chuck Nolan stayed in touch with reality through an icon of another person in Wilson. Photo-portraits were to the pioneers, and others, icons of missing family members and friends. As such, they mitigated loneliness and longing, especially in isolated homesteads.

Once a family was settled on the plains, the prairie, or in the mountains, obtaining a photo-portrait was both an enormous undertaking and expense; especially if the homestead lay far from overland shipping routes. Even if families lived close to a route, the portraits were expensive to have delivered because of the weight of the frame and glass. An average sized portrait weighed as much as ten pounds with the original wooden back, and was classified as both “furniture” and “glass” on stage freighting rate charts.

With no pavement or gravel for roughly a thousand plus miles, several rivers to slosh through, and baked mud pocketed with deep oxen tracks, the going was, needless to say, rough, and breakage was fairly common.

The Vacant Chair ad and other similar advertisements targeted the Western

Expansion immigrants. However, when looking at advertisements and literature from

49 Vicki Pierkarski, ed., Westward the Women: An Anthology of Western Stories by Women

various regions of the country, the indication is that working-class consumers everywhere took part in the purchase and display of photo-portraits. Wilgus noted that a single photographer in Philadelphia made over two thousand photo-portraits.50 Sales of photo- portraiture in San Francisco is credited with enabling the first commercial artists to support themselves.51 In the New York Times, the advertising strategy for the photo- portrait also emphasized that they were “life-sized” and promoted them for memorials of the deceased.52

The Victorian middle class was not enthralled, however, with where photography was taking the drawn portrait, whether a memorial or otherwise.53 In Prosperity: Fact or

Myth, Stuart Chase described typical home décor according to income and value of the house. Born in 1888, Chase was raised through the years of the most saturated display of photo-portraiture. He wrote as an economic and social critic regarding the results of industrial capitalism. From the 1890s though the 1930s in books of various genre, the photo-portrait was a boundary icon between the middle and working classes. Chase created a fictitious composite American town, Middletown, which he designed as a representational model of most thriving industrial towns in middle America (such as

Gary, Indiana). He applied nationally-compiled data to the model.

“Twenty-seven percent of the working class lived in houses valued $2,500.00 or less.”54 The value of the same money today (not the home) is approximately $30,000.00

(Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1984) p.77. 50 Wilgus, “Professor Woodward.” 51 B. P. Avery, “Art Beginnings on the Pacific” The Overland Monthly 1, no. 1, (July 1868) pp.28-34. 52 The New York Times, n.d., 1864(?). 53 Freund, Photography and Society, p.75-77 54 Stuart Chase, Prosperity: Fact or Myth (New York: Charles Boni Paper books, 1929) p.56

according to a direct inflation calculator. (It is safe to assume the calculator must leave out the inflation of real estate values, defense contracts, and the offset costs of environmental clean up, in the intervening 87 years—one is hard-pressed in 2006 to find a house anywhere in the country under $55,000.00). 55 In Middletown, this level represents 2,500 out of 9,200 homes, or twenty-seven percent. Touring Middletown,

Chase described what he sees:

The poorer working man coming home after his nine and a half hours . . . enters the living room of his house. From the room the whole house can be seen . . . worn green shades hanging down at tipsy angles admit only a flecked half light upon the ornate calendars or enlarged colored portraits of the children in heavy gilt frames tilted at a precarious angle just below the ceiling. . . . We now move up to the 4,000 houses in Middletown valued at $2,500.00 to $4,500.00, and inhabited chiefly by skilled workmen and clerks. . . . Knickknacks are everywhere—easeled crayon portraits on piano or phonograph, a paper knife from Yellowstone . . . but rarely any books. . . . [Chase then quotes a furniture store manager] “working class families are persuaded to buy very expensive living-room suites and let the rest of the house slide a bit.” Next we have the 2,000 houses valued at $4,500 to $7,00.00. Here live head bookkeepers, small proprietors, school teachers and the lower ranks of the business group. It is a battle ground of forced choices—between hardwood floors for the front hall, or a much needed rug, or music lessons, or a Y.M.C.A. camp for the children. . . . But Whistler’s portrait of his mother will probably be on the wall, and a set of Dickens in worn binding in the parlor bookcase.56

No need to walk any farther up the hill with Chase. He finds better, more appropriately displayed art—and much better libraries—at the top of the hill. What is important here is that the photo-portrait is present in the working class home, but in neither the homes nor the libraries at the top of the hill.

55 The Inflation Calculator, http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ Internet website, accessed 15 February, 2006.

Chase distinctly drew the class line between laborers and their homes with photo- portraits, and the educated professionals and other elites who displayed art and wrote about art history in the 1920s. The group that made up the American working class of the mid-nineteenth century is not so easy to convoke and categorize. For instance, would one place laborers with little or no income, such as slaves or sharecroppers, in the working class? Or would one include business owners who did not amass wealth, such as a shoe- shiner, hairdresser or seamstress? Did the service industries on the plains and in the mining towns of the West make up a part of the working class along with the industrial urban laborers? Or the miners themselves? If not, in what “class” were they? Obviously, the cultural expression of such divergent groups is impossible to amalgamate. “Working- class,” even as a convenience, falls short.

As stated earlier, the portraits are an expression of the universal themes of the pursuit of happiness, identity or self-worth, and loneliness across varied cultural lines within the United States and elsewhere.57 The role of the photo-portraits in American homes for fifty years begins to make sense only if they are considered as cross-cultural icons of non-ranking laborers and landowners. Consider the contemporary invention of the wringer-washer in the mid-1860s.58 Among those who washed their own clothes, no cultural agreement was required in order to appreciate the advantages the new invention offered. The photo-portrait provided, perhaps for the first time, a nationwide popular art

56 Chase, Prosperity, pp.56-58. 57 Joel Garreau, The Nine Nations of North America (New York: Avon Books, A division of the Hearst Corporation, 1981). See center section of Plates, “Maps to the Nine Nations.” Garreau explains in his book that nine distinct cultural regions exist in North America: The Islands, Dixie, The Breadbasket, MexAmerica, Ecotopia, The Empty Quarter, The Foundry, Québec, and New England. Garreau provides a summary overview of these regions describing cultural attributes. The Plates are inserted between pp.204- 05. 58 New York Times 5 May, 1864.

form that could similarly cross regional boundaries and small differences in financial stature. A portrait may cost two weeks pay for the lowest-paid wage-earners—depending on choice of frame, location and shipping cost. Yet, the portraits were attainable with that sacrifice; and low-wage-earners across the country found the means to have at least one or more made of their parents or grandparents. This really bugged rich people.

The elite thought it problematic that the poor spent money on photo-portraits in order to elevate themselves through abominable “art” and fancy doodads. The elite failed to understand the role of the portraits in the lives of the poor or isolated. Arthur Train, an elitist and social critic during the 1930s, bemoaned the “vulgarity of lifestyle” in an “era of mammon replacing Puritanism in the post Civil War Era to the Panic of 1873, ‘The

Dreadful Decade’ 1865-1875.” Train’s fear was that future anthropologists would think poorly of Americans when looking back at the rubble of his decade. He applauded the real luxuries attached to class, such as yachting. His lamentation over the dreadfulness of it all included:

To pin the label more exactly it was the heyday of the cameo, “what not,” the worsted motto, the painted fire board, and the tall vase filled with pussy willows or cat-tails tied with yellow ribbon, which decorated everything from the coal scuttle to the whisk broom. Offenbauch was the Gershwin of the opera, Detaille, Rossa Bonheur and Bouguereau, the accepted exponents of pictorial art, and every parlor had its “cozy corner,” its curio cabinet and bamboo or scrollwork easel holding crayon portraits of heavily whiskered males and dour ladies of aggressive rectitude.59

59 Arthur Train, Puritan’s Progress: An Informal Account: of Certain Puritans and their Descendents from the American Revolution to the Present Time, Their Manners and Customs, Their Virtues and Vices: Together, with Some Possibly Forgotten Episodes in the Development of American Social and Economic Life During the Last One Hundred & Fifty Years (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931) pp.276-77. The chapter is titled “The Dreadful Decade.”

In 1903, O. Henry put a spin on sentiments akin to Train’s. He used the lamentations of the elite for the material in the following tongue-and-cheek manner for which he is famous, in “The Discounters of Money”:

How properly to alleviate the troubles of the poor is one of the greatest troubles of the rich. But one thing agreed upon by all professional philanthropists is that you must never hand over any cash to your subject. The poor are notoriously temperamental; and when they get money they exhibit a strong tendency to spend it for stuffed olives and enlarged crayon portraits instead of giving it to the installment man.60

It is now becoming apparent that the photo-portrait had the capacity to serve the meaningful and universal expression of hope in an after-life, and comfort in this present life for a mourner. Beyond this, it is apparent that the working class alone valued the portraits for those qualities. The photographic crayon portrait was a photographic studio product nationwide, and thus was too commercial for more refined tastes in art. However, the writings cited above drew a class line from outside of the class itself, showing no understanding of the social norms and expressions as imbedded codes in the use of the portraits—in fact, attacking the artistic taste, rather than embracing the cultural expression, of the poor. The photographic crayon portrait had become associated with the working class by the turn of the twentieth century and remained so through the Great

Depression when they became less frequently mentioned and rarely seen.

O. Henry’s passage additionally implies that it took a little extra income to purchase a photo-portrait; and if any extra income occurred, installment men had first dibs. The concept again implies two ideas about the photo-portrait: that to buy one was an

60 O Henry, “The Discounters of Money,” Roads of Destiny (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1919) p.40.

irresponsibly compulsive act, and that this action required a sacrifice from the family’s need, rather than from their excess. In our own day, similar attitudes are expressed against “welfare recipients who own fancy cars and can somehow afford to eat out.” One expresses self-worth or identity in portraits then, and cars now. One enjoys fleeting escapism with stuffed olives then, or Benihana61 now. In this way, contemporaries of both classes universally understood the photo-portrait.

Writers used the photo-portrait as a cultural metaphor for the working class—but doing so would only have been possible if the general audience understood them as such.

Following are a few literary excerpts, showing that their audiences understood the crayon portrait as emblematic with the poor, and furthermore understood the “crayon portrait” to be the photographic crayon portrait.

Zora Neale Hurston exhibited tremendous confidence in the imagery and subtle layers of meaning and metaphor invoked in the reader when she wrote the following passage during the Great Depression, in Their Eyes Were Watching God:

Every Morning the world flung itself over and exposed the town to the sun. So Janie had another day. And every day had a store in it, except Sundays. The store itself was a pleasant place if only she didn’t have to sell things. When the people sat around on the porch and passed around pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to.62

Hurston went on to give the example that Janie’s fellow townsfolk gathered on the storefront porch each day and Janie expected them to find some way to bring up

61 Any restaurant desiring to replace Benihana in a manuscript, please call soon—proud descendant of a crayon portrait family. Better yet—Benihana . . .

“Matt Bonner’s yellow mule.” They exaggerated stories about the mule. They exaggerated their lives as a way of belonging to each other in a manner that fulfilled the same social needs as when the elite went yachting together. They enlarged life in a comfortable manner. This is what the crayon enlargement was known for, bringing to life what might otherwise be lost or nonexistent. It exaggerated the size, the potential, and the past of the common folk. And it did so in a comfortable way that was both familiar and mundane. Though the frame was ornate, the photo-portrait’s typical black drawings on a white ground are comfortably “known” rather than “examined” and “critiqued” as art.

Hurston counted on her readers to intuitively understand this, though in most U.S. towns the photo-portrait was outdated or otherwise gone by 1937. In provincial areas, and in

Hurston’s rural Southern town, the portraits were well remembered from childhood, and perhaps a few yet hung on the walls.

George Lackoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, explore how cultural metaphors such as the one displayed in Hurston’s writings are “mapped” into the language. A metonymic construct involves building a whole from parts that include qualitative specifications. Lackoff and Johnson used the example, “We need some new faces around here.” “New” is the qualitative signifier of “faces,” the actual metaphor.

Language such as this is always present in our culture, the authors explain. “The tradition of portraits, in both painting and photography, is based on it.” 63 The iconography, or

“face value” of the photo-portrait relied on the traditional understanding that the face is the equivalent of the essence of the being. This is the portrait’s foundational code,

62 Zora Neale Hurston, Novels and Stories: Jonah's Gourd Vine; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Moses, Man of the Mountain; Seraph on the Suwanee; Selected Stories. (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984) p.215.

regardless of portrait type. Included beyond foundational codes in the photo-portrait were the ideas expressed in Hurston’s language. That is, the photo-portrait provided an elaborate imaginary space for the poor where exaggeration was acceptable, and even expected.

A successful metaphoric construct connects an individual’s fundamental human emotional needs to their cultural values and norms through these foundational codes.

Hurston imagined Janie musing over the fulfillment of the human need to belong to a group or family—the counterintuitive to the fear of loneliness. The fulfillment is represented in metaphor and its icon is the photographic crayon enlargement.

Understood in the terms of such metonymic constructs, the historical role of the photo-portrait is more than merely a class marker; it can aid exploration of the deeper social codes of those who purchased and created them. Additionally, those codes are embedded in the language that built up around the photo-portrait for a period of fifty years. What layers or qualifiers of these metaphoric constructs transferred into new constructs though their original place markers in the language died out? For instance, potters “throw” pots. The word “throw” in an archaic form of English actually meant

“spin” in its day. The word evolved but not the use of the word in ceramics. This example speaks of an outward progression of terminology. Could there be an internal progression of self-identity codes for the working class that could be better interpreted with a fuller understanding of why the working class stopped displaying the portraits during the Great

Depression? In a sense, the photo-portraits are fingerprints of emotional codes in the

American working class, and they carry the imaginary “DNA” of metaphoric constructs

63 Lackoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, p.37.

from their estranged rich relative, the crayon. Just as both photo-portraits and crayons have the same foundational metaphoric codes of portraits, yet, as has been shown, they have vastly different qualifiers in their metonymic constructs according to cultural response and perspective.

Hurston’s crayon represents all the thought pictures of the poor, bestowing on them an artistic glow—and an inner glow—to make them “nicer to listen to.” So for the poor, the act that is “compulsive” is more akin to the instinct for survival when considering the social codes imbedded in the photographic crayon portrait. In the beginning of this section, I alluded to Lazare Mijuskovic’s idea that loneliness is so great a fear that it is intuitively compensated for through culture, even before it is experienced.

Nolan in Cast Away did not create Wilson consciously as a companion. He essentially saw a head and hair in the handprint and drew the face compulsively. Four years later, when he lost Wilson at sea he wailed in his aloneness and hopelessness. Authors such as

Hurston and directors such as Zemeckis are genius at placing the metaphor into the psyche of their characters. Again, this is because the lives of the writers, directors, actors and audience are inseparable from these metaphorical “thought pictures.”

Consider another O, Henry example from his 1904, “Hostages to Momus”:

Ruales? They’re a sort of country police; but don’t draw any mental crayon portraits of the worthy constable with a tin star and a gray goatee. The Ruales—well, if we’d mount our Supreme Court on broncos, arm ‘em with Winchesters, and start ‘em out after John Doe et al. We’d have about the same thing.64

64 O.Henry, “Hostages to Momus,” The Gentle Grafter (New York: Doubleday, Opage & Company, 1917) p.198.

This is a perfect example of the photo-portrait as the frozen historical metaphor.

The writer is confident that the audience not only knows what a “crayon portrait” is, and what it looks like, but also understands the social codes, or cultural context of their use enough to compare and contrast through photo-portraiture before he tells them not to.

They will leap to the photo-portrait, but he says “don’t.” Why? Because the Ruales consider themselves the elite judges of the common folk who are just trying to survive.

Today, only a handful of archivists and conservators of photographs would know that the “crayon portrait” mentioned in this excerpt is the photo-portrait. Henry’s particular “crayon portrait” (again a “thought picture”) is of the kind that was used by municipalities and institutions—those that allowed the portrait to be of a living protagonist. Also important is that the Sheriff is a locally elected official. Here, Henry, shows his preferences for grass-roots democracy, and the working class. The context and the metaphor are both bound to the historical use, context, and O. Henry’s political innuendo. Thus, without an academic discourse by today’s scholars regarding the photo- portrait and its many names and uses, this metaphor, and this element of cultural collectivism of the American working class will be lost on future readers.

Though, as above, the photo-portraits of town officials might be made even in the poorest rural communities, the cultural norms of the nineteenth century did not encourage portraiture of laborers or of the poor. Below is an example of this norm expressed in

Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918):

Soon after I got home that summer, I persuaded my grandparents to have their photographs taken, and one morning I went into the photographer's shop to arrange for sittings. While I was waiting for him to come out of his developing-room, I walked about trying to recognize the likenesses on the walls: girls in

commencement dresses, country brides and grooms holding hands, family groups of three generations. I noticed, in a heavy frame, one of those depressing "crayon enlargements" often seen in farmhouse parlors, the subject being a round-eyed baby in short tresses. The photographer came out and gave a constrained, apologetic laugh.

"That's Tony Shimerda's baby. You remember her; she used to be the Harlings' Tony. Too bad! She seems proud of the baby, though; wouldn't hear to a cheap frame for the picture. I expect her brother will be in for it Saturday."

I went away feeling that I must see Ántonia again, another girl would have kept her baby out of sight, but Tony, of course, must have its picture on exhibition at the town photographer's, in a great gilt frame. How like her! I could forgive her, I told myself, if she hadn't thrown herself away on such a cheap sort of fellow. 65

Several important messages come through this reference. The speaker is not getting their own portrait made, but rather having one made of grandparents. The “crayon enlargement” is now relegated to farmhouses—even in the plains states.

They are “depressing.” The photographer is apologetic. The frame (still available along with the crayon enlargement) is too expensive for

Ántonia’s financial situation. The entire situation The above portrait is of Lucille Pavelka, born in 1892, to Anna Sadilek was in bad form—and required forgiveness—yet Pavelka, the “real” Ántonia from Willa Cather’s youth. This is the actual Ántonia was not to be forgiven. This passage loads photo-portrait of “Tony Shimerda's baby” that inspired this passage. Reprinted here from Cather’s My everything negative ever said about the unsung Ántonia, p.427. hero of this thesis. In addition, the passage provides

65 Willa Sibert Cather, My Ántonia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994) From the chapter, “The Pioneer Woman's Story,” pp.295-96.

a glimpse at an interesting role of photo-portraiture. When the need was no longer prevalent to fill the space with those left behind or lost in migration, the space was relegated instead to the hope for the future—the children.66

Ántonia’s disgrace is packed into the photo-portrait on display. While this passage establishes the social norms surrounding photographic portraiture, it also shows the last days of popularity for the photo-portrait. Within a year or two, flappers took those depressing peepers of the dead down from the wall. They did not like old dead things.

Flappers were not as lonely as the generations before them. They stayed young for a longer time. And they were hooked up with cars, telegraphs, and telephones. If they wanted to talk to dead people they’d hook up with a gypsy and crystal ball. Old was out and youth was in. Imagine an art deco scene with those gaudy gilt-framed-charcoal-faced ugly looking goons plastered all over the place—simply not an acceptable juxtaposition.

Flappers liked mirrors, shiny and new. They represent America’s first youth movement that became popularized—known for distinct dress, grammar, artistic flare, and music.

The old dead grandparents were coming down, and the flapper knew just what to do to make sure of that. The photo-portrait would henceforth be: outdated—old—stuffy— depressing—boring—just like creepy old people themselves to a Flapper.

Eleanor H. Porter, writing in 1919, addressed the beginning era of one of the most exaggerated generation gaps in modern times in her collection of short stories, Across the

Years. In the title chapter, “Bridge Across the Years,” she gave each generation a voice.

The old farm belongings of the Burton family were going to be auctioned off at the

66 The above photo-portrait is from Willa Cather’s, My Ántonia. The portrait is of Lucille Pavelka, born in 1892, to Anna Sadilek Pavelka. My Ántonia is based on Cather’s youth. Anna is Ántonia, this is the actual crayon portrait spoken of in the passage. Reprinted here from Cather’s My Ántonia, p.427.

expressed wish of the pushy young daughter-in-law. She and her husband wanted to modernize the place, and move the grandparents into a nice apartment in town—where they could better care for themselves as they age. The “farm things” were to all be sold in the auction. Grandma Burton was shocked to find that this meant all of the household belongings. “In fact, everything the house contained, except their clothing and a few crayon portraits, seemed to be in the same category.” Grandma Burton was dismayed and protested, but was told that there would be new beautiful things in town for her. She expressed her lament in a quivering voice that they wouldn’t be “these,” Mrs. John laughed, patted the old woman’s cheek, and said, “No, they certainly won’t be these!”67

The flappers could not say goodbye fast enough to the Victorian décor. Art deco was in. Here, the photo-portrait stood out as a crusty old corpse of an image. Photography had come so far since the first photo-portraits that the end of the run for the photo-portrait was only a matter of time. The country was settled from coast to coast, and families that did separate had trains, cars, and soon airplanes to reunite them for holidays and reunions. Though a crisp black and white could be enlarged to life-size without needing a drawing to enhance it, those prints did not replace the cultural role of the photo-portrait.

The photo-portrait and its traditions simply all but died out.

Max Beerbohm, wrote Zuleika Dobson sometime between 1911 and 1926. He contrasted the age of the grandfather and that of the conjurer-flapper granddaughter,

Zuleika, by having her unpack her ever-present dressing trunks in one of the

Grandfather’s rooms. By the late twenties, in literature and theater, the crayon portrait,

67 Eleanor H. Porter, Across the Years (New York: Grossett & Dunlap Publishers, 1919) p.171.

photographic or otherwise will be considered one way to set the scene as outdated and drab.

The sun streamed through the bay-window of the “best” bedroom in the Warden’s house, and glorified the pale crayon- portraits on the wall, the dimity curtains, the old fresh chintz. He invaded the many trunks which—all painted Z. D.—gaped, in various stages of excavation, around the room. The doors of the huge wardrobe stood, like the doors of Janus’ temple in time of war, majestically open; and the sun seized this opportunity of exploring the mahogany recesses. But the carpet, which was now almost entirely faded under his immemorial visitations, was almost entirely hidden from him, hidden under layers of fair fine linen, layers of silk, brocade, satin, chiffon, muslin. All the colors of the rainbow, materialized by modesties, were there. Stacked on the chairs were, I know not what of sachets, glove-cases, fan cases. There were innumerable packages in silver-paper and pink ribands. There was a pyramid of band-boxes. There was a virgin forest of boot trees. . . .

The Sun couldn’t help notice the change in décor.

If this story is indicative of the exotic cultural pulse of the Flappers, then probably nobody even noticed the portraits, one by one slipping from the scene. It is a sure bet that

Flappers—not fond of nostalgia—tossed more than a few portraits into incinerators. But the photo-portrait would not be so easily snuffed. In fact, at the same time across town those conte crayon ears could almost hear the audience applaud. The photo-portrait had made its way onto the stage. Like human spirit writ large, a metaphor pointing to the

“here after” is one tough cultural cookie.68 In the early day of the portraits, the 1860s and

1870s, they were used by the theater as expensive playbills of the actors that traveled ahead of the troupe. 69 Actors eventually complained about theater costs, including the

68 Philipp Blom, To Have and To Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (Woodstock & New York: The Overlook Press, 2002) pp.152-53. 69 David Beasley, McKee Rankin: And the Heyday of the American Theater (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002) p.203.

cost of the portraits, affecting their meager wages. The photo-portrait had to earn its own way after that; it was relegated to a mere prop.

The metaphorical constructs coded in the photo-portraits percolated through the culture just in time—and the old portraits could then double as props. Props are highly evolved coded icons for creating place, period, personality, or any other immediate impression the playwright wishes to convey without words. The photo-portrait had already passed the test of setting a literary scene. The setting of a stage is similar to the opening of a chapter, such as Zuleika’s trunks spilling forth color and texture and modern femininity. A prop—what better way to cut costs than let dead portrait people play the role of the dead? No costly acting classes. No prima donnas. It was simply genius!

But dead people in poor people’s outdated homes would probably not have sold well during the Depression, even though it would be the theater’s way of making the best use of already spent funds. Comedy and folk plays could be the only real venue for the dearly departed icons. Frederick H. Koch, writing in 1939, explained in American Folk

Plays that “‘folk drama’ was the work of a single author dealing consciously with his materials, the folkways of less sophisticated people living simple lives not seriously affected by the present-day, complex social order.”70 Now don’t go setting the stage with a heartless middle-class fop finding cheap ways to make fun of outdated poor people during the Great Depression. Alone, one photo-portrait might represent a dead person’s spirit, a friend such as Wilson, one among a crowd of photo-portrait spectators, or a

70 Frederick H. Koch, ed., American Folk Plays: Edited with and Introduction, “American Folk Drama in the Making” (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1939) p.xv.

witness to a crime—as in The Count of Monte Cristo’s “witnesses.” 71 But the best iconographic role a photo-portrait could ever “prop” for would be to play the dead . . . like falling off a wall for this unsung cultural hero.

In the 1935 Patricia McMullen play, Cottie Mourns, a “folk-drama” comedy illuminating the Ocracoke Island folk, three anonymous photo-portraits are props for the three deceased husbands of Cottie Culpepper. They join her as mourners in black at her fourth husband’s funeral. Because props are icons packed with social codes, in this case the portraits represent all of the constructs thus far examined:

The room is simply furnished. In the rear is a decrepit cupboard of antique design and a rough, hand-made table on which stands a curiously shaped bottle—probably washed ashore from a derelict sailing vessel—filled with brightly colored, artificial flowers. Occupying most of the room is a jumble of chairs recruited for the occasion. Two hand-hewn benches stand against the left wall, and in the right corner of a nondescript stand is a “talking machine” with a large cornucopia horn. A well-worn oil- skin coat and seaman’s hat hang on pegs at the left. Most prominent in the room, however, are three life-size crayon portraits of Cottie’s three dead husbands, mounted on easels and festooned with mourning black. 72

71 In retrospect, those famous witness portraits of the Count’s were crayon drawings, as The Count predates the first photo-portraits—hmmm, even the crayon’s metaphors were written as smarter characters than the metaphoric “characters” of the photo-portrait—interesting, Alexandre Dumas wrote The Count de Monte Cristo in 1844-45. Obviously, there was no photograph at that time that could meet the eyes of the guilty from across the room as the “witnesses” do. Daguerreotype would fall flat on its face trying. The author has been told, but has yet to find evidence that O. Henry’s The Duplicity of Hargraves was played with crayon portraits surrounding Hargraves as his “friends” on the stage while he provides the monologue and mixes the mint juleps in mockery of the Southerner, Talbot. Still looking for this script to confirm. 72 Koch, American Folk Plays p.533.

Jerd: That there licker wa’n’t quite rotten enough, Cottie. Hit hain’t so hard to play dead when folks think they’s helped kill you.

Cottie: [terrified, for once in her life]. Jerd, y’ain’t dead?

This “Cottie Mourns” stage scene was photographed sometime between 1936 and 1939. The crayon portraits on stage are not real crayon portraits, but ironically props meant to represent the casted props. Reprinted here from American Folk Plays edited by Frederick H. Koch. 1939. p.533.

The photographic crayon portrait was not included in history of photography texts to an extent that would help the Cottie Mourns stage hands create a reasonable facsimile of one after about 1935. The crew, within ten or fifteen years after the portraits were gone from neighborhood homes, perhaps had no reference base for what crayon portraits were.

The era of the photographic crayon portrait had ended. The cultural metaphors not interpreted—already lost. The crew made drawings with Crayola™ crayons—lacking ornate frames—and these were the ironic “make do” props for actual photo-portrait props as the spirits of Cottie’s dead husbands. This strange twist of the iconographical aspect of the portraits is interesting, though it is an anomaly. It is included here merely to show that, even after a relatively short span of time had passed, the real portraits were either

unknown or unavailable—though they had initially been written into this play and others as props.73 The entire concept of the photo-portrait initially representing the deceased may already have dissolved away from the general knowledge of those 1930s and 1940s theater students.

Concluding Chapter II

The photographic crayon portrait has a bollixed-up history. From the perspective of the elite they were a despicable and vulgar attempt by the working class at unwarranted self-importance. From the working class perspective, they were memorials, objects of longing, anchors of biological heritage, and an obligatory competition with their neighbors. The photographic crayon portrait was a veil between this world and perhaps a better one through which many imaginatively crossed for comfort and inspiration. Whether in theater or literature, the photographic crayon portrait never merely represents a memory—it is always a living spirit, a witness, a mask and a mirror, reflecting the social codes of the authors and viewers, but always emblematic of the working class.

The most stunning reflection of social codes imbedded within metonymic constructs of the photo-portraits, however, is their use as an expression of the folk-hero archetype found within Mormon folk culture. Collectivism through the pioneer culture and doctrinal ancestor reverence, along with the metaphorical constructs thus far

73 Paul Green sets the stage for scene two in his 1927, three act play, The Field God: “ . . . On the walls hang several crayon portraits, distorted likenesses of relatives dead and gone.” The Field God and

examined, unite and from them emerge the only religious iconology that is uniquely part of the American experience; and the first or only to be represented in photographic imagery. Untouched by the historical movement models of art or photography histories, the photographic religious iconology of the Mormons requires careful theoretical examination. In the next chapter the subject is introduced and explored through LDS doctrine, worldview, folk culture, and testimonials.

Abraham’s Bosom (New York: Robert M. McBride & Company, 1927) pp.204-05.

III: MORMON FOLK CULTURE ICONOLOGY

Relics, however, are both dead and alive—parts of dead bodies or inanimate objects, but alive with the aura, the spirit of something greater, and more holy, than we are. ~~ Philipp Blom

Members of the LDS church, popularly known as the Mormons, have a founding father, Joseph Smith, whom they revere and consider a prophet, Compiled by his grand nephew, Joseph Fielding Smith, in The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, is the following passage:

What promises are made in relation to the subject of the salvation of the dead? And what kind of characters are those who can be saved, although their bodies are mouldering and decaying in the grave? When his commandments teach us, it is in view of eternity; for we are looked upon by God as though we were in eternity. God dwells in eternity, and does not view things as we do. The greatest responsibility in this world that God has laid upon us is to seek after our dead. The Apostle says, “They without us cannot be made perfect;” (Hebrews 11:40) for it is necessary that the sealing power should be in our hands to seal our children and our dead for the fulness of the dispensation of times—a dispensation to meet the promises made by Jesus Christ before the foundation of the world for the salvation of man. Now, I will speak of them. I will meet Paul half way. I will say to you, Paul, you cannot be perfect without us. It is necessary that those who are before and those who come after us should have salvation in common with us; and thus hath God made it obligatory upon man. Hence, God said, “I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord; and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.” (Malachi 4:5-5)74

74 Joseph Fielding Smith, comp., The Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, First printing

The Mormons fulfill the responsibility bestowed upon them through two ceremonies performed in their temple; these acts are formally conducted by a member of their priesthood. The ceremonies are called the “Sealing Ceremony,” and the “Baptism for the Dead.” The performance of these ceremonies is referred to by Mormons as their

“temple work.” According to their beliefs sealing and baptizing an ancestor in the temple assures Mormons of the following: first, that the ancestor is brought into the eternal

Kingdom of God; and second, that the ancestor is reunited with biological and spiritual family members in God’s Kingdom. Mormons are organized around and active in their doctrinal beliefs and duties.

The beliefs surrounding the sealing and baptizing of ancestors are raisons d’être for Mormonism. To Mormons, there will be rewards or repercussions in their own afterlife according to their taking part in sanctified temple rituals and ceremonies concerning the welfare of deceased ancestors. Mormons take seriously their charge by

Joseph Smith to "seek after [the] dead.” Thus, to Mormons, their highest calling is to perform sanctioned works in the temple for deceased members of their family lineages.

This calling is the reason the LDS church emphasizes genealogical studies and record keeping.

In preparation for performing their work in the temple, LDS members make a

“Remembrance Book”75 in which they collect genealogical information about each

in paperbound edition (Salt Lake City: Deseret Books, 1989) p.356. Joseph Fielding Smith was the son of the sixth president of the church, Joseph F. Smith, the last president to have actually known Joseph Smith while he was alive. Joseph Smith was Joseph F. Smith’s uncle. Joseph Fielding Smith was the church historian and tenth church president. 75 Appendix Figure 2 shows a cover of a Remembrance Book. Figure 3 shows a page from a Remembrance Book.

ancestor. Any images of ancestors that can be obtained are included: drawings, paintings, or photographs. The book will eventually contain information about sealing and the baptism for each ancestor, as well as when and by whom the temple work was completed.

The church also keeps official copies of these records.

The temple ceremonies are sacred to the church. Members do not disclose the mechanics of any temple ritual, nor any details involving the inside of the temple.

Respecting Mormons, the ceremonies are not detailed here. Even so, what can be said about the ceremonies important to this discussion is that the sealing and the baptism of the deceased involve sympathetic—that is homeopathic or imitative—rituals.

As Sir James George Frazer teaches in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and

Religion, sympathetic rituals or ceremonies are practical and mechanical aspects of enacting and initiating personal intentions on either the laws of nature, or in the spiritual realm. Similar intention and enactment may be found in one form or another throughout all religions.76 Effectual or not, universal or not, holy or evil, true or false—your bag, my bag—matters not to this topic. A continuum between charms and taboos is evidenced throughout all cultures. Charms are at the positive end of the continuum They include the cross, holy relics, or perhaps stars that are wished upon or thanked as lucky. Taboos are their polar opposites, and bring negative effects. They include the inverted horseshoe which lets its luck “fall out,” broken mirrors, and the evil eye. In their most culturally pervasive form, charms and taboos are variously present as metonymic constructs contained in languages.77

76 Frazer, The Golden Bough, pgs.11-22. 77 Lackoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By pp.39-40.

Practicing sympathetic rituals such as sealing and baptisms for the dead is certainly one of the compelling reasons behind a folk culture embracing the photographic crayon portrait. A second reason behind embracing photographic crayon portraits is that the Mormon pioneers of the 1840s through 1860s have become a legendary heroic class throughout the Mormon community. In To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of

Collectors and Collecting, Philipp Blom explains how both of these sympathetic and folk hero concepts are forceful indicators in the development of holy relics. Though the LDS church has not designated or defined photo-portraits as sacred objects, the people of the church do so through their collective response to the portraits. Blom states, “Think of somebody who has a T shirt Mick Jagger wore in 1960-something or shoes McCartney was seen wearing on stage—these would be secular relics. Think of a Lincoln autograph—That’s a holy relic because it connects you to him.” In the same way,

Mormons remain connected to their revered pioneers—through the holy relics of portraits.

In a Public Radio International (PRI) interview, Blom was asked, “Is that the thing we’re looking for? The connection to somebody who is gone or who will never be connected to us in real life?” Blom answered, “I think it is the connection to something that we’re looking for—something we love, we aspire to, we want to be like—and I think that is very important for collectors.78 Given the understanding of Mormon doctrine as it pertains to looking after the dead, and given Blom’s explanation that holy relics connect us to those who we deeply admire that are deceased, and further given the analogous role of the photographic crayon portrait as touted in nineteenth-century advertisements, it is

safe to suggest that the photographic portraits of the Utah pioneers grew in status as holy relics as the portraits grew in number in the homes of Mormon families.

First let us consider the doctrinal reasons for why Mormon folk culture would adopt the photographic crayon portraits of the pioneers as holy relics. Dr. Jean Thomas, former Stake Relief Society President in Malad City, Idaho, provides a Mormon’s doctrinal perspective to the conversation between Blom and the PRI interviewer. She explains:

The LDS Church has a deep interest in family history or genealogy. Doctrinally it’s because we feel this life is just one link in a whole eternal chain and that eventually we will be meeting these people again [those of the photographic crayons]. So we want to make sure that we know them, that their church work has been done for them—their temple work—so we do [the temple work] in order to save them, so to speak. And make sure their baptisms and their temple ordinances have been done. We believe that the family is forever. So we want to be able to link as far back as we can. We figure those who come after us will link back all the way. There will be more blessings and more opportunities to be with our family forever, generational in the eternities.79

Earlier, in chapter two, we explored the synecdoche “the face equals the portrait;” i.e., a hand cannot be a portrait. But what about photographs other than the photographic crayon portraits? In Dr. Thomas’ example, any photograph of an individual could be used as a way to know an ancestor and secure their place in Heaven. While it is true that any photograph could become a relic, the memorial intentions of those who purchased photographic crayon portraits set the portraits apart as cherished objects in their earliest attention-drawing display.

78 Philipp Blom, “To The Best of Our Knowledge,” interviewed by Anne Strainchamps, (Wisconsin Public Radio, 19 February, 2006)

The Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museums (the DUP) collectively display around ten thousand photographic crayon portraits. Interestingly, despite the relic status of the portraits, without exception the Mormons interviewed for this project did not know the photographic crayon portraits had originally been made as memorials in the 1800s.

Upon hearing this, eyes open wide, mouths drop open, and Mormons tend to express delight and validation with this renewed knowledge. The memorial sentiments of the

1860s through the 1890s may have been lost as the personal stories of bringing home a deceased relative’s portrait faded. However, the modern day metonymic construct embedded with the reverence has certainly not faded from the folk culture. The love of nineteenth-century pioneers for the individuals memorialized in the portraits is transferred to modern-day Mormons without those stories, because of Mormon doctrinal reverence for ancestors then and now.

The nineteenth-century idea of the memorial portrait has instead been emotionally infused into the Mormon folk culture as illustrated by the ways they are displayed, used, and discussed. Like the Eternal Flame on John F. Kennedy’s grave, the photographic crayon portrait becomes a permanent memorial, with a life-like quality. Mary Johnson and Edith Menna, President and 2nd Vice President, respectively, of the DUP Museum in

Salt Lake City both emphasized that the portraits are displayed for people preparing their genealogies and temple work. Johnson and Menna shared that photographic crayon portraits offer believers a direct “spiritual link” to ancestors.80 Although this spiritual link can be experienced with any image, the life-sized face of the photographic crayon

79 Dr. Gloria “Jean” Thomas, interview by author, 16 February, 2006, taped recording, Malad City, Idaho. This concurs with every Mormon who has shared their thoughts for this study.

portrait, and its waiting presence as one enters the room, represents the primal connection humans have with the face. Again, in Cast Away, Nolan talks to the life-sized Wilson, coming and going from the cave, but must, as with the daguerreotype, take a moment or two to find and focus on the little watch-locket image of his fiancé. One is a presence, the other a keepsake.

In addition to the life-size presence of the photo-portraits, what seems equally important is the obvious omission of background scenery or interior distractions that other photographs exhibit. The vignette deliberately removes the rest of the world. The face is bound to its metaphors of essence, spirit, persona, or similar projections. Wilson did not need to be a real face to be a powerful presence in Nolan’s life. Bill Slaughter,

Photographs Archivist for the LDS Church History Department responded to the quality of presence in the photographic crayon portrait in comparison to other photographs by saying, “this [other] person is just as real, but [these portraits] take it up a step.” Earlier, he said, “they are certainly more ‘in your face’.”

Slaughter has an interesting perspective as a person who converted to

Mormonism. Prior to our interview, he thought that perhaps one reason there were so many photographic crayon portraits was because they were harder to lose than the smaller cartes de visite. The implication then that the glut of photographic crayon portraits he experiences in the archive resulted from the fact that they were difficult to lose, allowing them to survive into the new millennium. Since being presented with a folk culture connection, Slaughter agrees with the premise that the portraits may have been

80 President Mary Johnson and 2nd Vice President Edith Menna of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, interviewed by author, 29 November, 2005, video recording, Salt Lake City, UT,

actively collected in light of Mormon doctrine. Additionally, he was surprised to learn that crayon portraits did not exist in such excessive numbers elsewhere in the country.

In 2001, the Denver Public Library Western Research Department reported having only a few collections that included photographic crayon portraits; however, the portraits were not recognized as such until described to staff members. The LDS Church

History Department Archive alone has forty-two collections that respond to the keyword search under “crayon.”81 This disparity between SLC and Denver collections suggests that either more people bought photo-portraits in the Salt Lake Basin, or more people did not lose them—or both.

When a Mormon contemplates a photographic crayon portrait of a pioneer

Mormon, themes imbedded in Mormon religious practices are evoked in his or her emotions. In this way, the image changes from iconographical, or representational, to iconological, or capable of connecting with more complex cultural truisms.82

The demonstrable relationship between doctrine and doctrinal projections—when

Mormons think about the portraits or experience one—is foundational to understanding the photographic crayon portrait as an iconological expression of Mormon religious folk culture. Moreover, because the museums are not publicly owned, but rather privately owned by church-affiliated organizations, these expressions offer additional cultural indications concerning Mormon collectivism. Both of these areas deserve further theoretical exploration. Looking beyond the portraits and toward broader issues of

Mormon collectivism is beyond the border of this exploration.

81 Bill Slaughter, Photographs Archivist, LDS Church History Department and Archives, interview by author, Salt Lake City, Utah. Digital voice recording, 16 February, 2006. 82 Satchko MacLeod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class p.64-65.

The second predominant aspect of Mormon folk culture that ties Mormons to the photographic crayon portrait is the pioneer experience of the 1840s through the 1860s.

Mormons experienced excruciating hardships. Many children suffered and died en route.

However, let us fast-forward past the day of arrival into the Salt Lake Basin. Isolated as a rather large population with precious few supplies in the middle of rugged country—after planting season—pioneer Mormons organized quickly for their winter survival, and began preparing the ground. They established a barter system and a way to bring specific supplies in with each wagon yet to arrive. They also established a dangerous trail to the

South that would make a trade route to San Bernardino, where they improved the port and the city in order to help alleviate famine and other hardships.83 Many died, and those that lived struggled in poverty against a rugged landscape. However, they succeeded in saving life, in settling a prime location by modern standards, and eventually with some compromise they secured the right to practice Mormonism for their descendants. This is the image of the Pioneer Mormon that every modern-day Mormon is proud to be connected to. Modern-day Mormons also express a great deal of heartache, gratitude, and a sense of reciprocal obligation when they consider hardships suffered on their behalf.

The pioneer population gave everything they had to support each other and build

Salt Lake City and the church. When the photo-portrait reached Utah in the late 1860s, they were simply not affordable for most of the first pioneers. The first group of pioneers arrived in the valley on July 24, 1847. This day became an annual holiday to celebrate

83 Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979) pp.96-105.

patriotism in American values, especially freedom of religion.84 The hardships of the pioneers are made legendary through Pioneer Day reenactments. The 4th of July is also celebrated. In 1897, the church declared a fiftieth anniversary “Jubilee” celebration in honor of the pioneers’ arrival in the Salt Lake basin.

During the Jubilee preparations, photographers stepped froward to make free enlargements of any photographs of a Mormon pioneer whose family had never been able to afford to have the photo-portrait made from that photograph.85 The offer was for all

1847 pioneers, even those still living.86 If they had never been photographed, they were photographed first, and from this image the photo-portrait was made. Many came forward to have their parents and grandparents’ images enlarged to life-size. These photographic crayon portraits went on display at the “Hall of Relics.” The hall was constructed specifically for the exhibition that showed various types of memorabilia and pioneer artifacts. The building was made to look like the Parthenon, the Doric Temple of

Athena.87 In essence, the living pioneers were reconfigured as living holy relics because of the Jubilee. They were highly honored that day and have been continually honored since then.

Fay Cottle, Director of the Malad City Pioneer Museum, is concerned about future generations honoring the pioneers in a like fashion. Cottle believes that if her children could see the DUP Museum, with the photographic crayon portraits of her

84 Ethan R. Yorgason, Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003) p.29. 85 A Celebration Beyond the Imagination: 1897 Pioneer Jubilee, Internet website, http://www.dupinternational.org/jubilee/pioneers.htm, 15 March, 2006. 86 Two hundred and fifty 1847 pioneers were still alive and gathered in temple square for a group photograph. The photograph can be viewed at the following web address: http://www.dupinternational.org/jubilee/pioneers.htm, 15 March, 2006.

grandparents that are on display there, her children would be inspired. “I think they tell us a lot even though they can’t talk,” she said speaking of the photographic crayon portraits at the DUP Museum in Salt Lake City. Several of her ancestors’ photo-portraits are displayed there. “I kept thinking how many descendents all these people have left . . . and do [those descendents] ever go in there and look at [their ancestors]? Do they even know they are there? A lot of things we have today because they worked so hard,” she said with obvious love for the pioneers and a hope to see them appreciated in the future. Cottle also believes that if she could get her daughters to Salt Lake City to see the portraits, she knows they would reconsider the importance of their ancestors and of the rest of the pioneers. Her statement suggests that she believes these portraits help transfer values of

Mormonism from one generation to another. When asked directly if this was her belief, she stated, “Oh yes, they inspire.”88

A twenty-two-year-old Mormon, Angela Seamons, a work-study desk assistant at the Idaho State University Library Copy Center in Pocatello, was curious about my reading microfilm from the first decades of The Salt Lake City Deseret Evening News.

She asked what the research was about. Upon hearing of it, she agreed on the spot to discuss her faith with a stranger, and a non-Mormon, while being recorded. After the portraits were described to her, she said she was familiar with them, and knew of the ones her grandparents still display in their home in Chesterfield, Idaho. She said she and her community just call the photographic crayon portraits “pictures,” as she shrugged at the word “pictures.” Angela’s response is in keeping with those responses of most people

87 To see an online exhibition of the Hall of Relics, visit the following website: http://www.dupinternational.org/ .

thus far interviewed regarding the recognition of photographic crayon portraits; i.e., they know what they are, but have no historical vocabulary for them. With recorder on, she was asked if the photographic portrait was special in any way to her. But somebody goofed by fumbling with qualifiers—stumbling around without an interview sheet handy—do you see them as a “spiritual link?” or “simply as an image of a loved one?”— was the basic fumble. Surprisingly, despite my fear that I had influenced her to choose one of those two qualifiers, she responded in an unexpected direction, further supporting the iconology of the photographic crayon portrait in Mormon folk culture. She stated:

When I look at “pictures” it makes me remember all the things that they gave up for me to make my life better so that I could practice my religion freely without getting discriminated, or whatever. So I guess there is a spiritual link, I guess you could say. Because it does make you feel closer to your religion.89

Angela told me that the old church in Chesterfield, Idaho, has been turned into a museum. She said the walls are filled—completely filled—with photographic crayon portraits.

The 2,600 photographic crayon portraits are a strikingly poignant display at the

DUP Museum in Salt Lake City. The DUP has 22,000 members, and many museums who have not taken—and will not take—their photo-portraits off the wall.90 To the

Mormons, there is a sympathetic proxy system in the temple ceremonies. That is, part of the temple work involves “standing in” for deceased loved-ones. The most revered people in Mormon culture are the early pioneers. This coupling of temple work with

88 Fay Cottle Director of the Oneida Pioneer Museum, interview by author, 16 February, 2006, Malad City, Idaho, digital voice recording, Silver X Photographic Conservation, Hagerman, Idaho. 89 Angela Seamons, Student at Idaho State University in Pocatello, Idaho, Assistant in the Copy Center, interview by author, 19 February, 2006, Pocatello, Idaho. Digital voice recording. University of Idaho microfilm reading room. 90 Johnson and Menna, 29 November, 2005. Also see Appendix Figure 5.

ancestral reverence, combined with photographers’ sales pitches geared toward maintaining the presence of the deceased, provided the perfect cultural soup for a uniquely American religious iconology to emerge in life-sized photographic portraiture.

In closing this chapter, this thought shared by Dr. Jean Thomas combines reminiscences of “The Vacant Chair” advertisements with the Mormon doctrinal constructs, marrying the relic with the metaphor, thus expressing the iconology through her experience:

. . . but it’s like they’re all looking down on us and kind of smiling and saying, ”you’re doing a pretty good job of continuing our legacy.” It is kind of nice to know those histories are there and that people know who they are. I think it is nice that we’ve been able to track down and pretty well figure out who everybody is in the Malad Museum. I’ve been to a lot of museums where there’s just a bunch of pictures and nobody seems to know who they are. So it is nice to see them—that their memory is preserved. I always think it is sad when somebody is gone, buried, and nobody really remembers anything about them.91

Through the Mormon folk culture the photographic crayon portraits serve in their historically most elevated public role. Like the pioneers they represent, they with them will not be buried, where “nobody really remembers anything about them.” They are vindicated after years of being considered unworthy of their rightful place in the dimly-lit halls of the history of photography.92 These portraits have status far beyond the ordinary photograph. They are loved for the treasures they hold in the faces of the Utah pioneer

“saints.”

91 Dr. Thomas, 16 February, 2006. 92 For an example of how the DUP fills every available wall, even the stairwells, with the portraits, and how that display shares visual elements with seventeenth-century Russian iconology, see Appendix, Figures 4 and 5.

IV: CONCLUSION

The photographic crayon portrait was the only nineteenth-century photographic process specifically addressing the human desire to perpetuate relationships beyond the permanent separation of a loved one, though death or departure. To use these portraits to mitigate such losses far outweighed their cost, or the ridicule of the elite that accompanied them. The first years of production of the photographic crayon portrait coincided with Western Expansion. While pioneers greatly suffered from loss, longing and loneliness, they did not have a monopoly on those emotions. The photographic crayon portrait enjoyed great popularity in all countries that used photography, as photography is an international technology, and has been since France freely gave the technology to the world in 1839.

Simplistic and at times gaudy, yet capable of delicate beauty and charm, the photographic crayon portrait endured great ridicule by elites who saw it as a failure of

“real” fine art and illustration. The elite never understood the cultural value of the portrait to the working class, to the pioneer, to the families separated by oceans and rugged distances. Nor have they yet done so. Those close to the pulse, such as writers and playwrights who exploited life through drama, recorded the portrait’s role as a working- class indicator, and with glib metaphors represented the portraits as a folly of the poor, a pomposity of small town municipalities, and eventually as passé and provincial.

The first historians of photography purposefully snubbed them. Since then, few historians have mentioned them, although they can be found in the background of some image in nearly every text that discusses nineteenth century photography or its history.

Somewhat like the unicorn, they show up once they are believed in. Or like the silent pachyderm, they patiently wait to be discussed. My favorite example of this phenomenon is in Keepers of the Light, a well-distributed and deserving working guide to nineteenth- century processes. Almost summing up the historic treatment of the photographic crayon portrait . . . guess what is never mentioned about the gum dichromate photograph below?

It’s not the photographer, and it is not the gum dichromate process . . . it’s the poor dude who can never compete, the pachyderm, and the unicorn all in one.

Photographer Stephen Livick, 1974. Reprinted here from William Crawford’s The Keepers of Light, 1979. p.201.

Livick’s image celebrates how this cultural metaphor has taken on a life of its own. Found in numerous literary works that mention crayon portraits specifically and as metaphor, found in many plays as a prop, and found in nearly every history of photography as an “extra,” the photographic crayon remains a present actor in our culture in spite of statements that wrongfully diminish their importance as a nineteenth century photographic aesthetic.

From the Western Expansion era through the Dust Bowl, interiors of working- class American homes usually included one or more photographic crayon portraits.

Because of this pervasive presence in the culture, and because of the general loss of familiarity with the portraits today, the portraits have been overlooked by most researchers. In these photographs as in literary works, the ability to interpret the image and the metaphors has therefore been impaired. The frozen historical metaphor exists in the images, verbal expressions, class indications, literary works, theater, or as icons in the early twentieth century. The context of each of these occurrences must be carefully examined with cultural and class indicators taken into consideration in order to understand the source. Some of these indications have been dealt with in this thesis; however, much remains to be researched in the 1860s and 1870s primary source material regarding production and purchases, artists and consumers. In particular, one might wonder how or why the first artists, such as Sandys, decided that these portraits were not worthy productions? Was this what ruined the reputation of the portraits and portrait makers—or was it simply the working class fascination with them that prompted the elite artists to consider them vulgar?

In Utah, the portraits themselves and the events surrounding the making of them offer research potential for the future. However, the fate of the photographic crayon elsewhere is in great jeopardy. Their frames have been removed and the unidentified individual’s images have been discarded. Some that have suffered this very fate have been retrieved by Mormons and identified. Personally, I know of one-hundred-and-thirty- five of these salvaged portraits that Mormons have positively identified. Why would

Mormons dig old pictures of people that nobody knows out of the trash? What they believe is that the portraits are living links, and spiritual links, to the individuals in the portraits, and that those people have dignity, too. As a result, Mormons actively seek information about not only photographic crayon portraits, but about any individual’s photograph. Doctrinally, they sense an obligation to do so. Thousands of packets of information are attached to the portraits at the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in

Salt Lake City. The packets include a great deal of primary source material relating to

Mormon folk culture.

The Mormons responded to the photographic crayon portrait advertisements in the same fashion as other cultural groups across the country. However, the Mormons have a special reverence for their pioneer ancestors. Among Mormons, the pioneers have achieved a legendary folk hero status. The pioneers represent the zeal of Mormonism.

The pioneers that left Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846 and 1847 suffered horrendously, and many died. To the Mormons, the sacrifices of the early Utah pioneers represent the commitment to their faith that most Mormons hope to emulate. In museum collections throughout Mormon country, the portraits are collected in large numbers and put on permanent display in order to help transfer the values of the pioneers to future

generations. Because of this use of the portraits, they are transformed into holy relics. A facsimile of the portrait is not considered, therefore, adequate for display in place of the original. Only the original image provides the desired spiritual link, and a direct connection for their descendents. Collectively, the portraits constitute the only American religious iconology, and perhaps the only religious iconology worldwide that relies on the photographic image.

The photographic crayon portraits represent fascinating American cultural expressions. Other groups around the world have also turned to the photographic crayon as an icon of powerful grass-roots sentiments. As stated earlier, there remains more to be learned about the early years of the photographic sketch, between 1860 and 1865. These years would be the time when other cultures were first being introduced to the photographic crayon portrait in their photography studios. Were they advertised in the same manner as in the United States? If so, were the people in any other group as drawn to the portraits as the pioneers of the Western Expansion era? Many questions remain that deeply interest me. In particular, why was this practice not perpetuated using modern photographic processes if the needs that initiated the use of photographic crayon portraits are universally expressed across cultures and times? Is the historical record and current plight of the photographic crayon suffering still the disdain of elitists?

My goal is to pursue a doctoral dissertation that systematically explores frozen historical metaphoric constructs that are both embedded in and spring from early photographic crayons. I suspect that many sub-cultures found a means of expression through these first life-sized photographic portraits. Because linear interpretations are typical of histories of photography, subtle cultural roles of nineteenth-century

photography may be overlooked altogether; such has been the case concerning photographic crayon portraiture. Further research will offer modern-day historians an additional tool for interpreting nineteenth-century cultural histories. This is especially true regarding Mormon folk culture and iconology. My thesis only serves as an introduction to this subject.

I hope this thesis provided the reader ample opportunity to contemplate the importance of the role played by the photographic crayon portrait in the nineteenth- century American working-class, the pioneers and the rural folk cultures; and to contemplate its continued importance in modern-day Mormon folk-culture iconology.

Exploring portals created by the collective conscious that emerge through craft and culture to mitigate suffering, longing, or fulfill our need to belong to family or clan, provides a fascinating reflection of our own cultural sensitivities and values. Whether ornately framed or gently exposed in a bloodied handprint, such metaphors as those examined through this study undergird our lives with a safety net that we compulsively enlarge and mend. Enlarging, strengthening, and mending is how this thesis gave form to the history of the photographic crayon portrait. There was a hole in our net. Now that it has this emergency patch, perhaps the overall weave of the history of photography will be better served to catch a glimpse of us, smiling at our descendants.

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APPENDIX

Figure 1.

Solar enlargers in use. E. Long & Son in Quincy, Illinois. 1889(?). Reprinted from Eugene Ostroff, “A History of Enlarging,” p.66.

Figure 2.

13¼ by 9 inches, shown here cropped from the post end. The gold buildings are the Mormon temples. This book is courtesy of the private collection Lillianof Pittman. 22 February, 2006.

Figure 3.

Browning’s temple work was completed (note “LDS

Remembrance Book page for James Green Browning. This page shows that Ordinance Data”). Courtesy Lillianof Pittman. Private collection. 22 February, 2006.

Figure 4.

Iain Zaczek in The Art of the Icon, states, “This miniature iconostasis gives a clear impression of the way that icons were normally displayed in church.” Seventeenth century Portable Icon Screen, by Andrei Rublev (1360/70-1430)(?).

Figure 5.

Even the stairwells are filled. Photographic crayon portraits, iconological images of the Mormon Pioneers. Present-day holy relics of Latter-day Saints. Photographed by author. DUP Museum, SLC. July 28, 2005.

GLOSSARY

ALBUMEN: an emulsion made from egg-whites. Webster.

AMBROTYPES: a positive picture made of a photographic negative on glass backed by a dark surface. Webster.

BINDER: something (as tar or cement) that produces or promotes cohesion in loosely assembled substances. Webster.

BUST: a sculptured representation of the upper part of the human figure including the head and neck and usually part of the shoulders and breast. Webster.

CONTRAST: degree of difference between the lightest and darkest parts of a picture. Webster.

DAGUERREOTYPE: an early photograph produced on a silver or a silver-covered copper plate. Webster.

DUDE! ARE YOU SERIOUS?: a twenty-first century pop-culture expression of amazement.

GUM TRAGACANTH: a gum obtained from various Asian or Eastern European plants (Genus Astragalus and especially A.gummifer) of the legume family that swells in water and is used chiefly as an emulsifying, suspending, or thickening agent. Webster.

MEDIUM: material or technical means of artistic expression. Webster.

MONOCHROMATIC: having or consisting of one color or hue. Webster.

PIGMENT: powdered substance that is mixed with a liquid in which is relatively insoluble and used especially to impart color to coating materials (as paints) or to inks, plastics, and rubber. Webster.

POSTAGE-STAMP: suggesting a postage stamp in size. Webster.

PRE-RAPHAELITE: a member of a brotherhood of artists formed in England in 1848 to restore the artistic principles and practices regarded as characteristic of Italian art before Raphael. Webster.

PROOF: a test photographic print made from a negative. Webster.

: reciprocal trade? (I write for food.)

VIGNETTE: a picture (as an engraving or photograph) that shades off gradually into the surrounding paper. Webster. Note: The image on the cover of the thesis provides an example.