Edward Steichen 1879-1973

The photographer to his sister, Lilian Steichen Sandburg

By descent to the present owners

Another print of this image:

Dennis Longwell, Steichen: The Master Prints (The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), pl. 51

Joanna Steichen, Steichen's Legacy (New York, 2000), pl. 10

This portrait of Edward Steichen’s sister Lilian, a forward-thinking, independent young woman, captures the spirit and strength of character for which she was known.  Edward Steichen’s soul mate from childhood, Lilian remained a touchstone and an inspiration throughout the photographer’s life.  In her unadorned dress and sandals, posed in a natural setting, Lilian was a far remove from the conventional beauties that Steichen would photograph in his early career.      

The print offered here comes by descent from the family of the poet Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967).  The photograph is believed to have been taken in 1907, the year before Sandburg and Lilian Steichen were married.  When this picture was made, Lilian was a school teacher and poet who spent her free hours in the service of the Social Democratic Party.  The setting is Menomonee Falls, a picturesque rural village just northwest of Milwaukee, where the Steichen family owned a farm.  At the time of this writing, only one other print of this image has been located, in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, a gift of the photographer in 1964. 

Lilian Anna Maria Elizabeth Magdalene Steichen (1883 – 1977) was by all accounts a brilliant and unusual young woman, and Steichen adored her.  In 1900, at the age of seventeen, and to the shock and dismay of her father, she abandoned her studies at a convent school to enroll in the University of Chicago’s undergraduate program in Urbana, where she steeped herself in the writings of Thorstein Veblen, August Bebel, and other prominent social theorists.  A committed socialist and a firm believer in women's suffrage, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in mathematics. Her first meeting with Carl Sandburg, who in 1907 was not only a poet, but also a labor organizer, took place at the Wisconsin Social Democratic headquarters in Milwaukee. Two kindred spirits in their fight for the common man, they were married within months of their meeting.

Lilian claimed credit for converting both her mother and her brother to lofty Socialist ideals, and Steichen’s portrait of his sister at Menomonee Falls is a tribute to the highly individualistic young woman she had become.  Melinda Boyd Parsons, in her article ‘Edward Steichen’s Socialism’ (History of Photography, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter, 1993), discusses the German-American socialism so prevalent in midwestern immigrant communities at the turn of the last century, and points to Lilian’s preference for a natural, unaffected look—no make-up, no fashionable dress, no elaborate hairstyle—as proof of her ideals (ibid., p. 320).  In the portrait offered here, Lilian is an archetypal female, close to the earth, clearly her own person.  As Steichen wrote to her in an undated letter, '''I see in you things great and glorious—in any way you go if you will always be but true to your best self—be it as a Joan of Arc or as a wife and mother''' (ibid., p. 323). 

The print of this image owned by The Museum of Modern Art, a platinum and gum-bichromate print, is different from the image offered here in both tonality and mood.  The pervasive and muted gray tones of the Museum’s print clearly depict a daylight setting.  With his virtuoso darkroom powers, Steichen has rendered the present scene a twilight or evening study, with dramatic dark areas and a moon placed on the horizon.  This interpretation of the negative echoes not only Steichen’s passion for moonlit landscapes, but also that of his sister, to whom this print belonged.  As Lilian once wrote to Carl Sandburg, ‘You see brother and I are very sympathetic—we’ve watched storms come up together—we’ve made pilgrimages together on moonlit nights to birch woods listening in the Silence for the heavy fall of the dewdrop—we’ve looked at his pictures together. So he knows that our tastes are akin’ (ibid., p. 319).