Anonymous American Photographer, possibly John Plumbe, Jr.

half-plate daguerreotype, in a brass mat and preserver, circa 1845

This daguerreotype sets forth a great amount of detail on the Washington Monument and the adjacent buildings. For instance, each brick in the façade of the building to the left of the monument can be clearly discerned upon close inspection. The plate itself is in good condition. There is minor tarnishing along the bottom edge of the image, and hints of tarnishing along the other edges. This tarnishing is completely appropriate for a plate of this age and does not impede one's enjoyment of the image. There is a small accretion of indeterminate nature just to the left of the center of the bottom edge, only visible upon close examination. When the plate is examined closely, there is a faint warm-toned haze visible in the sky. None of these condition issues is obtrusive, and none impact negatively upon the generally fine appearance of this rare daguerreotype.
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This half-plate view of Baltimore's Washington Monument was taken from the east side of Charles Street at the foot of South Washington Place, looking north at the front of the Monument, and showing virtually the full east-west span of Mt. Vernon Place in the background. The three buildings in the background (all on the north side of Mt. Vernon Place) are (from right to left) the Howard House (built 1830), the Greenway House (built 1835), and the Tiffany-Fisher House (built 1842).  City records, as well as prints of the Monument and Mt. Vernon Square Place, verify that both sides of the Place were entirely built up by 1847/48.  Therefore, the span of time within which this daguerreotype could have been made is narrow.  Based on the architectural evidence in the image, as well as other records, and the physical evidence of the plate and its packaging, a date of 1845 seems probable.  

While the authorship of this daguerreotype is undocumented, it is clearly the work of an accomplished daguerreotypist.  Given its superior quality and its half-plate format, it may have been made by John Plumbe, Jr., or William S. Porter (of the Fontayne and Porter studio), both of whom were highly skilled technicians, were active in Baltimore in the mid-1840s, and worked with half-plate and larger cameras.

There are more substantial grounds for attributing this plate to John Plumbe, or at least to his Baltimore gallery, which was managed by Jacob Shew.  Plumbe's was the major daguerreotype establishment in Baltimore in the mid-1840s, and he is known to have made at least one view of the Baltimore Washington Monument (the image is known from the Plumbeotype, or lithographic, reproductions of it), as well as one of the city's other major public memorials, the Battle Monument, a half-plate of which is among the six Plumbe daguerreotype views in the collection of the Library of Congress.  While the tightly framed vertical compositions of both these images are very different from the horizontal panorama encompassed by the half-plate offered here, they present concrete evidence that Plumbe was engaged in documenting Baltimore's monumental landmarks.  More significantly, a brief article about Plumbe's Gallery in the Baltimore Republican & Daily Argus newspaper of January 3, 1846, mentions 'a view of the Washington Monument, taken from Charles Street' that was on display in the gallery during the writer's visit.  While this reference is not conclusive, it does accurately describe the daguerreotype offered here. 

An attribution to William S. Porter is more tenuous but not implausible. According to Ross Kelbaugh's Directory of Maryland Photographers, 1839-1900 (1988), Porter and his partner, Charles H. Fontayne, had a gallery in Baltimore in 1844 and 1845.  Fontayne moved to Cincinnati in 1845, but Porter remained in Baltimore and maintained a studio there into 1848, when he joined Fontayne in Ohio. No Baltimore views by Porter are known or are mentioned in the contemporary literature.  However, in 1848 - before he left the East Coast - Porter made at least two multi-plate panoramas in Philadelphia: one of the Fairmount Waterworks (now in the collection of George Eastman House) and the other of Girard College.  Both panoramas are of exceptional aesthetic and technical quality and are obvious precursors to the more famous Fontayne and Porter panoramas of the Cincinnati waterfront.  It could be argued that a comparison of Porter's Philadelphia and Cincinnati panoramas to the Washington Monument daguerreotype offered here shows stylistic similarities in the handling of space and perspective.  

There are very few daguerreotypes of Baltimore extant, and all but one of these are in institutional collections.  As noted above, there is a Plumbe half-plate of Baltimore's Battle Monument in the collections of the Library of Congress, and Plumbeotype views of the Washington Monument after a daguerreotype by Plumbe exist in several collections.  There are 9 daguerreotype views of Baltimore from the early 1850s, all by Henry H. Clark, in the collections of the Maryland Historical Society.  A sixth-plate of a Baltimore street scene is included in the Henry Fitz, Jr., Collection in the Division of Photographic History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.  And Maryland photo-historian Ross Kelbaugh reports a whole-plate view of the Washington Monument , which he attributes to Henry Fitz, Jr., in a private collection. 

Sotheby's thanks independent photographic historian William F. Stapp, of Washington, D. C., for sharing with us his extensive research on this daguerreotype.