ANONYMOUS AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER | CHARLES SHERWOOD STRATTON (GENERAL TOM THUMB)

Ken Appollo, Rhinecliff 

Collection of Len Walle, Novi, Michigan, acquired from the above, 1978

Acquired from the above, 1992

This half-plate daguerreotype shows a handsomely-dressed young Charles Sherwood Stratton (1838-1883), better known to history as the P. T. Barnum creation ‘General Tom Thumb.’ An early review in The Tribune described Stratton as ‘. . . by far the most wonderful specimen of a man that ever astonished the world. The idea of a young gentleman, eleven years old, weighing less than an infant at six months, is truly wonderful. He is lively, talkative, well proportioned, and withal quite a comical chap’ (quoted in Eric Lehman Becoming Tom Thumb: Charles Stratton, P. T. Barnum and the Dawn of American Celebrity, p. 22). When the diminutive Stratton was ‘discovered’ and made his debut at Barnum’s American Museum in New York on 8 December 1842, however, he was in fact just four years old. A celebrity of international renown, it has been estimated that in his more than three decade career Stratton gave at least 20,000 performances globally, meeting such notable figures as Queen Victoria and President Abraham Lincoln. 

In photographs from the 1840s-50s, Stratton was often posed standing on chairs, likely both for size comparison and ease of photographing, and daguerreotypes of similar composition are in collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Harvard Theatre Collection, Cambridge, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. In the aforementioned photographs, Stratton wears similar finger rings as are visible in the present plate. 

The identity of the standing gentleman is unknown. When this daguerreotype was originally acquired, it was postulated that he was Charles’ father Sherwood Edward Stratton. It has subsequently been suggested that the individual was one of Charles’ tutors.