Portrait of a Man Reading a Newspaper (Case Recto)

Very soon after the first instruction manual for the making of daguerreotypes arrived in North America in the late fall of 1839, John Plumbe, Jr. had the novel idea of establishing a chain of daguerreian studios. By 1843 he was doing business in Boston, Albany, Saratoga Springs, New York City, Philadelphia, and in 1846, Washington, D. C., where President Polk and former President John Quincy Adams were among the celebrities who posed for him. Plumbe finally had to turn the operations of his satellite studios over to assistants who were generally much less skillful than he. Quantity apparently began to take priority over quality as he added even more studios in Louisville, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Dubuque, where he committed suicide at the age of forty-eight. There is no way of ascertaining whether this remarkable study of a man, who may be a publisher, is by Plumbe himself (his name is impressed in the brass mask), or by an assistant. It is certainly an example of one of the Plumbe Studios' higher quality works.

Weston Naef, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 34. © 1995 The J. Paul Getty Museum.