Daguerreotype portrait of a man in an oval vignette – Vintage Wall Art
(Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
Few images capture their era like this historic photograph of Daguerreotype portrait of a man in an oval vignette. It is part of the Snapshots of the Past archive, gathered over 25 years of research.
Choose the framed print, ready to hang the day it arrives, or the unframed print for a frame of your own. A fine choice for anyone who loves history, and a gift that gets noticed. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Snapshots of the Past has been bringing history to the wall since 2001, for tens of thousands of customers worldwide.
Daguerreotype portrait of a man in an oval vignette
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A daguerreotype from around 1840 offers a rare glimpse of the medium in its first years, when the process was barely a year old and every image was a unique positive on a silvered copper plate. The sitter is shown inside an oval vignette, a framing choice that softened the edges of the figure and drew the eye to the face, a fashion common in early portraiture. Because daguerreotypes cannot be reproduced without being re-photographed, each surviving example is effectively one-of-a-kind, and its mirror-like surface reflects the viewer as much as the subject. The record does not name the sitter or photographer, so the man's identity remains unknown, but the image stands as an early document of how studio portraiture took shape.
| Created / published | 1840 |
|---|---|
| Original scan | 1,307 × 1,536 px · prints to 4 × 5 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | 455_Unidentified_man_headan_1840 |
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Snapshots of the Past helps heritage brands, museums, historians and storytellers tell stories with history: historic prints, image licensing and historical storytelling drawn from more than 25 years of research and curation.
