Family reunion

Four years ago I posted the above image, dated 1887, of a young French woman named Alexandra Marie Fulton de Lipowski. Thanks to a message from a Lipowski descendant I can now post the following photo, which shows her older sister Marie.

The photographs were taken at the same studio, Photographie Prost in Meaux, and in all likelihood they were taken on the same day, as the clothing and pose are nearly identical except for the sisters' pins. Marie's photograph has remained with the family, but Alexandra's somehow wandered across the Atlantic, where I found it in an antique shop. The reverse of the photo is shown below.

Both of the sisters lived long lives. Alexandra, who was married at least twice, died in 1971 at the age of 97. Her sister Marie had died the previous year at 98.

Thanks JH for the information. Alexandra's photograph has now rejoined the family in France.

Alexandra

Note: This post has been updated (September 2019) based on new information from the family. See new post for a photo of Alexandra's sister Marie. Thanks, JH.

According to the inscription below the image, the subject of this carte de visite was named Alexandra Marie Fulton de Lipowski. The photograph was taken in 1887 by the studio of Photographie Prost, also known as Bruant, in Meaux, a bit east of Paris.

The young woman can fairly safely be identified as the daughter of Gen. Ernest de Lipowski (1843-1904), a French military officer who served with distinction in the Franco-Prussian War. His daughter Alexandra was born on May 28th, 1874, and thus would have been twelve or thirteen at the time this photograph was taken. Her mother, Marie Eggerickx, died in 1875, and her father remarried a year later, to an English woman named Marianne Eastwood. Alexandra Marie (she also went by Alexandra Mary) eventually married a prominent French architect, Charles Blondel (not to be confused with the more famous psychologist of the same name), who died in 1912, and then married one François Geanty five years later. She died in 1971.

Ernest de Lipowski (more fully Joseph Antoine Ernest, Comte de Lipowski) was a French-born descendant of Polish aristocracy, though one document suggests that his parents had at some point resided in Spain. In October 1870, he commanded a unit of French francs-tireurs that temporarily held off a much larger force of German infantry at Châteaudun, and for his service he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. Towards the end of his life he served in the Russian Army.

De Lipowski's career was evidently distinguished, but it wasn't entirely without stain. In 1873 or 1874 he was fined and sentenced to a month in prison for escroquerie — a type of fraud. The gist of the accusation seems to be that he traded on his laurels (and perhaps on assurances of a fortune he did not in fact possess) to run up debts he didn't intend to pay off.

The whole affair strikes me, frankly, as a bit odd. Légion d'honneur archives preserved in the Base Léonore contain various documents related to the matter, most of them written longhand and with elaborate formality by various functionaries of the French government. Several of the documents suggest that de Lipowski was at least temporarily stripped of his title in the Légion d'honneur (and perhaps of his pension as well) as a result of his conviction, yet by 1880 he had ascended to the higher rank of officier in the Légion. Whatever it was all about, it appears to have eventually blown over. There is a bust of de Lipowski surmounting his tomb in the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Below: From the Base Léonore, the 1873 judgment against Ernest de Lipowski, his death notice from 1904, and a mention of Alexandra's marriage in 1901.

Americans (II)

Ancestors?

The portion of the apparent family collection that I was able to obtain consists of thirteen photographs in a variety of formats, dating from c.1880 to at least 1933. Those that bear indication of their source come from four states: Tennessee, Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Some were taken by studio photographers (all were apparently white) whose activities have been documented elsewhere; others are casual snapshots, probably taken by amateurs. A handful of the subjects are named: Vivian Garrett, Guss Crader from Jennings, Louisiana, Laurence (no last name). I've examined the auction listings of the other items that I wasn't able to obtain, but there isn't much more information to be gleaned there.

The images in this post include some of the earliest photographs from the group. All are studio photographs, and three come from Franklin County in the south-central portion of the state of Tennessee. The badly faded but haunting portrait at the top of this page, which is in the carte de visite format, was taken by Rufus B. Williams of Winchester, Tennessee. The reverse of the mount is shown below.

Williams, who was born in 1851, was in business by 1883 and remained active as a photographer for some years thereafter; he would go on to serve several terms in the Tennessee state legislature. The sitter's eyes have been marked with tiny pinpricks, perhaps to make them stand out.

The next photograph was taken by C. S. (Charles Stewart) Judd (1844-1892), a member of a family that included several other professional photographers.

The image, which is only 1.5 x 2.25 inches excluding the mount, is from the studio in Sewanee that Judd established in 1879; at various times he also operated in Columbia, Pulaski, and Monteagle. The same photographer was also responsible for two other images from this collection that are not in my possession; one, very similar to this one, depicts a young man whose last name may have been Miller; the other was taken in Judd's Columbia studio.

The next two photographs are by unidentified photographers and depict unidentified subjects. The first, of a standing woman with her hand on the shoulder of an older woman, is quite beautiful; having the two women stare in entirely different directions may have been a conventional studio pose, but it is deeply moving nonetheless. The water-damaged one that follows it, of a woman and child, is more awkward and uncomfortable.

At first glance the studio where the cabinet card below was taken is unidentified, but one corner of the image has begun to peel back from the mount, exposing the name "Schleier," and in another corner the word "Nashville" is legible through the thin photographic paper.

This would almost certainly be Theodore M. Schleier, a well-documented photographer who operated studios in New Orleans, Nashville, and Knoxville at various times between the 1850s and 1890, before serving as consul to the Netherlands under the administration of Benjamin Harrison. Schleier, who had Republican ties, was known for his portraits of Union soldiers. I'm not sure why the photo was mounted so as to hide the name of the studio; perhaps it was simply a mistake. The subject's mustache has been darkened by hand.

The last picture on this page, shown below, was taken at the Byarlay Studio in St. Joseph, Missouri. Byarlay, who was also an agriculturalist, was active as a photographer over a long period stretching roughly from 1880 to 1920, after which his establishment was renamed Bloomer Byarlay Studio. The photograph is almost certainly twentieth-century; the mount is similar to that accompanying the graduation portrait of a young man that will appear in a later post. The woman holds a relaxed, conventional pose; both she and the photographer have done this before.

One thing that should be noted about all of these photos is that they exist at all because the sitters voluntarily chose to be photographed. They aren't "documentary" or "colorful" images taken for the amusement or edification of white viewers. As far as I can determine, the identifiable photographers — Williams, Judd, Schleier, and Byarlay — were white, but subjects and photographers alike apparently felt comfortable in engaging in a commercial transaction centered around one of the ubiquitous rituals of late-19th-century bourgeois life: having one's photograph taken. Doing so would not have involved any great expense (some of the cruder and smaller images would have been very inexpensive), but it required a level of participation in urban or town life. They are, that is, portraits of citizens, in a social if not political sense. The photograph in the next post, however, may give a hint at the extent to which that citizenship was constrained.

Americans (I)

These photographs represent what are apparently fragments of a single African-American family album or family collection that was recently broken up and sold at auction. The photographs, which date from c. 1880 to at least 1933, offer only a few clues to the sitters' identities and histories, but if they do represent the members of a single, much-extended family (which is not quite certain), then through them we can trace a rough network of family connections and spanning at least four states and roughly fifty years of American history.


In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Darryl Pinckney wrote "In the US, white people are able to conceive of black people who are better than they are or worse than they are, superior or inferior, but they seem to have a hard time imagining black people who are just like them." The most striking thing about most of the photographs presented here, and in the posts that will come, the thing that shouldn't be striking at all, is how ordinary they are. What they reflect is the bedrock of experience: ties of kinship and friendship, rites of passage, memory across generations — the very things, that is, whose existence among black people has often been denied or downplayed. In their fragmentary way, these images remind us that, whatever our histories or notions of identity may be, most of us want basically the same things and will vigorously pursue them — if the doors aren't shut in our faces.

Future posts will examine these and additional photographs from the collection in greater detail.

Till Minne

I came across this little group of European cartes de visite in a box in an antique shop for a nominal price and bought the lot of them. Some of them clearly belong together; others, particularly the last, may have gotten mixed in by chance.

The first two images are by a photographer named Agnes Lundbom in Bäckefors, Sweden, which is now part of the municipality of Bengtsfors. The two sitters were likely related, and wear the same pin, which reads "Tille Minne" (In Memory or In Remembrance), but both the jewelry and the clothes may have been studio props.


The next three are apparently also Swedish, from a studio named Visit Fotografi, and once again the first two sitters are wearing what appears to be an identical crescent moon and star pin, although it's hard to see the similarity without a magnifying glass because of the difference in angle and exposure. All three cards have traces of glue and paper in the same spot on the reverse, indicating that they were probably kept in an album together. There is a very faint pencil inscription on the back of the first; it is all but unreadable but the woman's name may have been Augusta.


The next two photographs were taken by Norwegian studios, the first by Aug. Haraldsson in Christiania (now Oslo) or Arendal, the other by Olaf M. Madsen in Fredrikshald (now Halden) near the border with Sweden. Both have ornate printed designs on the reverse side which include the words pladen opbevares, meaning, I'm told, that the photographer held onto the negative in case the customer wanted copies at some future date. On the back of the first one there is a space for a year, with the first digits "18" preprinted, so it was probably taken before 1900.


The last photograph comes from the studio of Beck Ödön in Budapest at the other extreme of Europe, and is the only one for which it's possible to assign the sitter a reasonably firm identity. According to an inscription on the back, written first in pencil and then partially traced over in ink, this young man is one Andrew Schwalier. Underneath his name, written in English and in ink, are the words "Born - 10/20/88." Since he appears to be between twelve and fifteen, the image was probably taken just after the beginning of the 20th century. According to a Social Security death record, an Andrew Schwalier with that birthdate died in New York in 1970. Unless he was an American native travelling in Budapest at the time he sat for this portrait it's likely that he had Americanized his original given name at some point.


Vast quantities of studio portraits like these were produced in the latter part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, in Europe, the US, and probably other parts of the world as well. A good number still survive, some carefully labelled in family photo albums or historical collections, others lurking in boxes and drawers or wandering the world, separated forever from their identities, their stories, their tragedies and dreams.

Repose

This image of the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena was presumably taken sometime during the period from 1859 to 1875, which was the heyday of the popular commercial photographic format known as the carte de visite. The photographer may have been named Hayward, as that last name and a first initial I can't make out are handwritten on the reverse of the card.


The tomb apparently still stands much as it was, although the outer fence shown here has evidently been removed. But even at the time this photograph was executed the emperor was no longer in his tomb, his remains having been repatriated in 1840 at the request of the French government.


This image, on the other hand, is a bit of a mystery. [See update at bottom.] It was issued by one "A. Hall, Photo-Artist" who operated a studio at 217 West Madison Street in Chicago, probably the photographer Albert K. Hall who is listed at that address in the 1876 Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago, but I haven't been able to pinpoint the scene it depicts. I don't know if the little pinnacle at right is a natural outcropping that's been adapted, or a wholly manmade structure. There's a cross on the roof, so it was presumably located either in a Christian country or in some colonial outpost, which in the second half of the 19th century could have meant almost anywhere. Perhaps a geologist could tell whether the arrangement of rocks on the shoreline is consistent with tidal activity, or just the shore of a large lake. There's no sign of vegetation anywhere, unless the dark stain at the far right is indicative of algae. It reminds me of nothing so much as the final scenes of Planet of the Apes.

Did the door open onto an anchorite's cell, a tomb, or even a tiny chapel? Was it some Crusoe's desolate hideaway at the end of the world? Does it still stand, or has it been long since battered apart by the waves?

Update (2021): The structure shown has been identified as the Capelinha do Calhau in the village of São Vicente in Madeira. Constructed in the late 17th century, it still stands. (Thanks KRW for the identification.)