Lynnteresting!

Little-known, interesting tidbits about this great city’s amazing history.

Lynn - Pretty as a Picture

As long as love has existed in Lynn, as long as babies were born, couples got married, family members moved away, or died too young, there was a desire to remember the occasion with a picture.

The first portraits were paintings by skilled – and sometimes not so skilled – artists living in or passing through Lynn. Two of Lynn’s earliest recorded resident artists were Miss Lydia Mansfield, a silhouette cutter, and Mrs. Towle, a portraitist and miniature painter. Miss Mansfield cut silhouette specimens of human figures, animals, birds, trees, and urns "in the most fine, and delicate manner, far surpassing anything of the kind we have ever witnessed from any other source." In 1824 she presented the visiting Marquis de Lafayette with an elaborate and huge silhouette cutting of him standing under a triumphal arch, surmounted by a bald eagle, and adorned with military emblems; it was “made wholly of different colored paper curiously cut with scissors.” Lafayette was suitably impressed with the life-sized image and sent her a gift in return. Mansfield derived the principal part of her own support from her skill. She was in “feeble health and employs her whole time cutting papers for ornamental work of every form, kind, and description.” Mrs. Towle advertised her artistic services in Lynn in the mid-1830s, but she and her husband moved to Washington D. C., where she became known for her portraits of the President, Vice President, and the heads of other departments of the federal government.

The most consistently advertising itinerant artist to spend time in Lynn was Joseph Wheeler, a portrait painter. During his 1830 visit he painted nearly forty portraits of Lynners. In spite of all the practice, his skills left something to be desired, prompting the local newspaper editor to assure his readership during a later visit by Wheeler that "the artist ... has greatly improved in the execution of heads, since his former visit.” Wheeler kept passing through Lynn every few years as part of his vast loop through eastern New England. Quick to adapt to changing times and customer interests, with each visit he offered slightly different or improved skills in his advertisements. In 1845 he became one of the first to offer a new kind of portrait made with a machine; it was called a daguerreotype.

The daguerreotype was the first photographic process for capturing an actual image of the subject. It was a painfully slow process, requiring deathly stillness from the subject for several minutes, and the result was in black and shades of gray, although colorists could paint in gold color to the jewelry, red to the lips, or perhaps pale blue to a dress – all at an additional cost, of course. But unlike the occasionally questionable rendition by a portrait painter with shaky skills, a successful daguerreotype was unquestionably the spitting image of a loved baby or the fondly missed relative who had moved away. In 1849, when dozens of Lynn fathers and sons got gold fever and decided to find their fortune in California, a photographer named Whitmore urged families and friends to get that last daguerreotype view of those who were about to leave for the gold fields.

James R. Newhall, one of Lynn’s historians, claimed to have taken the first daguerreotype in Lynn, a landscape, in 1841, just a couple of years after Louis Daguerre had developed the process in France. The new craft captured the public’s attention and the imagination of those with either artistic inclinations or scientific inquisitiveness (because of the photographic process and the use of chemistry), and certainly of those who saw great entrepreneurial opportunity in the new product. Newhall continued on as a judge and historian, never mentioning further photographic exploits, but others were anxious to get Lynn customers in front of the camera.

Horatio N. Macomber had gained some experience in daguerreotype photography while in partnership with Wilder T. Bowers in Saco, Maine. They ended their partnership to pursue separate photographic careers in blossoming markets: Bowers set up as a daguerreotypist in Detroit, Michigan and Macomber came down to Lynn to set up his own photographic saloon. He advertised that he had taken rooms in the Sagamore Hall building to take daguerreotype miniatures.

While James Newhall had been the first to take a daguerreotype landscape in Lynn, Macomber was probably the first to take a daguerreotype portrait (in 1842) as well as one of its earliest post mortems, in February 1844, of little Eliza B. Kate who died at just 21 months old. The glassy memento of Eliza was vainly doctored by adding red to the dress and lips, gold to the quilt pattern, and a faint pink blush to the face and hand, but none of it brought back life; the baby was still a corpse.

Over the next five years, S. H. Whitmore and William R. Appleton advertised their availability to take daguerreotype likenesses of Lynners after death. It was the last chance many would have to keep their loved ones with them, at least in two dimensions, “when the original is departed.” The Lynn News noted it had never seen a post mortem picture “that was pleasant to look upon,” the motionless bodies cooperating all too well for the camera. The newspaper therefore recommended a hasty trip to the picture parlor because “as life is at all times uncertain, no time should be lost.” Eugene H. Roney, another Lynn daguerreotypist, similarly urged, “Secure the Shadow ere the Substance fade!” Such developments in the early nineteenth century suggested to many that what was incomprehensible was nonetheless possible: a person could be seen without being physically present.

The career of Lynn’s daguerreotypists was often as fleeting as some of their subjects. Horatio N. Macomber left photography to become one of Lynn’s dentists while his former partner, Wilder T. Bowers, came to Lynn from Detroit and stayed on as a photographer for the rest of his life. William Appleton eventually gave up his camera to become a baker. Amos P. Scribner was a Lynn shoeworker who tried out taking daguerreotypes then went back to shoemaking. S. H. Whitmore left his daguerreotype business and was replaced by Theodore S. Williams who was, in turn, replaced by Charles G. Hill, who then left town after a half dozen years. Right after Eugene Roney arrived in Lynn, he seems to have just as quickly disappeared; I wonder if anybody took his picture before he did.

-- by Andrew V. Rapoza