Figure 1.-- This is an example of a caninet card photograph that just said 'Cabinet Portrait' in English. They are difficult to identify unless there is information on the back. In this case it looks to be German, although most German mounts idetified the studio and city. It was in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that these cards were most common. We would guess it was taken about 1910.

Most of the classic cabinet cards mounts had the name of the studio and the city at the bottom. We see some European mounts that instead just said 'Cabinet Portrait'. We see large numbers of these portraits. Often the studio and city was revealed on the back, but not always. Often the back was blank. Sometimes it just said 'Souvenir'. We see these cards mostly in Eastern Europe (especially Bulgaria Greece, Romania, Russia, and Serbia). Thus they are a very likely indicator of Eastern Europe, but we can not identify the country unless other clues are present. The English words and the Latin alphabet were used even in the countries using the Cyrilic alphabet, perhaps to give an impression of foreign technology. We also see some of these cards in Germany, but not very many. We are not sure why this became so common in Eastern Europe. It could be that the volume of sales did not justify individual pritings of card stocks for every studio. But it was very common. This is something we rarely see in Western Europe. We see this from the 1870s into the 1910s. Given the long period in which 'Cabinent Portrait' asused on the mounts , it does not help us much with dating the images.

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Created: 10:22 PM 8/27/2016
Last updated: 10:22 PM 8/27/2016