Figure 1.--This German cabinet card was taken at the Hitze studio in Stargard i/P. The family is unidentified, but we know the portrait was taken in 1891. The white/off white cards seem popular in Germany during the 1890s which was also the case in America.

German cabinet cards are generally easy to identify because they include the name of the city which is normally easy to identify as German, although some German towsare now in Ooland and other countries. Curiously, despite the number of German immigrants, there are relatively few American towns and cities with German names. We are not sure at this time when cabinet cards first appeared in Germany. CDVs we believe appeared in the late 1850s and cabinet cards a few years later, probably about 1865, but we do not yet have precise dates. CDVs were the dominant format in the 1860s and 70s. Cabinet cards did not replace the CDV as in America. Both formats were commonly made into the 1890s. Just as the French term CDV was commonly used, Germans commonly used the English-language term "Cabinet Portrait". A German reader tells us, "Today's in Germany, Cabinet would be written Kabinett but in 19th century some spelling rules were different. For example, the C was more in use. So Kabinett would have been written with C." I'm not entirely sure if this meant that the cabinet card format was commonly seen as of foreign origins. A German reader tells us that the word "portrait" became commonly used in German and could mean both a CDV or a cabinet card.

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Created: 5:03 AM 5/5/2009
Last updated: 5:03 AM 5/5/2009