Figure 1.-- This Robert Peckham portrait shows Webster Tucker (1834-72) about 1844. He is standing on a Venetian striped carpet in front of a wall with wainscoting, a grained footboard and a sliver of a grain-painted, paneled door with brass pull and a mantel and hearth on the other side. ; Webster appears to be off to school. He wears a black frock coat and vest with white lace collar, beige trousers, black shoes and holds a black hat with tassel in one hand and his school books in other. The jacket and pants do not match, but the vest does not match the jacket.

The first commercial phototographic process was developed in France--The Daguerreotype (1839). By 1840 photography was sweeping through America. Early 1840s Dags are rare, but the Dag process was fairly simple and very little capital was needed to set up a studio. By the end of the decade there were photographic studios in all cities and even many small towns. This was important because for the first time in human history we begin to see large numbers of images of ordinary people. Now Dags were expensive and a major purcase for low-income Americans, but a fraction of the cost of a painted portrair so we have a look at a much wider swath of the population than ever before. This is a huge boon for fashion historians and historians interested in every day common people. Not only do we have images of the great people of the day, but for the first time huge numbers of images of the common man or in the case of HBC--children. We also see naive ortraits being made. Photographic studios were putting these artists out of business, but there wee still quite a few. A good example is Robert Peckham painting of the Farwell children in 1841. We see John Farwell wearing a somber suit in contasts to this sisters bright-colored dresses. Notavkly the suit elements (jacket, vest, and pants do not match. Te images we see all show the boys wearing long pants after breeching. Almost all photographic potraits taken in the 1840s were Dags, but it is difficult to destinguish betwen 1840s and 50s Dags. Almost all Dags, however, show American boys wearing long trousers. This was true both for tunic suits and suits with trousers. As far as we can tell there were no exceptions except for pantalettes in the 1840s and we have a fairly large archives of Dags. Almost all American Dags were cased like the image here which is a good example of a tunic suit (figure 5). Younger boys or boys from wealthy families may have worn pantalettes, although this wa more common in Europe. The standard format is the subject sutting down by a cloth covered table. Commonly the image is cut off , but enough of the subject is shown to see that he is wearing long trousers. This was the case of all ages from the point of breeching.

Created: 6:04 PM 11/19/2023
Last updated: 6:05 PM 11/19/2023