Seth Kaller, Inc.

This album features more than seventy portraits of actors, authors, abolitionists, reformers, and political figures, as well as views of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Fair, and a variety of architectural, city views, and sculptures.

[FREDERICK DOUGLASS]. [FREDERICK DOUGLASS]. Photograph album with 202 photographs, ca. 1870-1885, 1903. 42 pp., 10½ x 13¼ in.

Inventory #27754       Price: $9,500

Francis E. Abbot, philosopher & theologian

Twenty architectural views, including several images of Washington, D.C., such as the U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Executive Office Building, the Treasury Building, the Smithsonian Institution Building, the Renwick Gallery, and the interior of the House of Representatives; panoramic photo of the Viaduct over the Cuyahoga River, Cleveland, Ohio, by Thomas T. Sweeny of Cleveland; several images of the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, including views of the Main Building, the Machinery Hall, the Horticultural Hall, the Art Gallery, and the interior of the Horticultural Hall.

Fifty-one photographs of sculptures, several of which were exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, including Pietro Guarnerio, “Vanity”; “Cold”; Donato Barcaglia, “Soap Ball”; Donato Barcaglia, “Beauty Holding Back Time,” also called, “Flying Time”; and Francesco Barzaghi, “Pharoah’s Daughter.”

53 Miscellaneous images, several of paintings, including:

• Montage of three images from President Garfield’s funeral, “Garfield Obsequies. / Cleveland, Sep. 26^th 1881”;
• The Grand Haven, the original ship of the Grand Trunk Car Ferry Line, Lake Michigan, which transported railroad cars of the Grand Trunk Western Railroad to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ca. 1903;
• Three views of New Orleans;
• Photograph of The Spirit of ’76 painting by Archibald M. Willard, 1876;
• A pair of postcards by clergyman and photographer Joshua Smith of Chicago, titled Good Morning, with three dozen smiling babies, and Good Night, with a similar number of crying babies, 1880.

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was an orator, journalist, abolitionist, and distinguished African-American leader. Born a slave in Tuckahoe, Maryland, as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he assumed the name Douglass after his escape from slavery in 1838. In 1841, Douglass successfully addressed a Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society convention and was employed as its agent. He wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845 to document his experiences and sufferings and to silence those who contended that a man of his abilities could not have been a slave. Douglass soon became a noted anti-slavery orator and supporter of women’s rights, lecturing in both the United States and England. He attended the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights and signed its Declaration of Sentiments. Douglass edited his own newspaper, The North Star, for several years in Rochester, New York. He revised and updated his autobiography in 1855 as My Bondage and My Freedom. During the Civil War, he was instrumental in advocating for African-American combat units, and in raising troops.  He fought for passage of the Thirteenth (Abolition), Fourteenth (Equal Protection), and Fifteenth (Voting Rights) Amendments, through testimony to Congress, reports to the President, and regular appearances on the lecture circuit. In 1872, Douglass was nominated for vice-president by the Equal Rights Party on a ticket headed by Victoria Woodhull. Douglass was the first African American to serve in important federal posts, including Marshal of the District of Columbia (1877-1881), Recorder of Deeds for Washington, D.C. (1881-1886), and Minister-General to Haiti (1889-1891).

George Kendall Warren (1834-1884) was born in New Hampshire and opened a daguerreotype studio in Lowell in 1851. He specialized in portraiture but also focused on senior class photographs for colleges, including Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, Harvard, Brown, Yale, and Rutgers. He opened a studio in Cambridge in 1863 and began an extended project of photographing the architecture and campus life of Harvard. In 1869, the Union Pacific Railroad commissioned Warren to document the building of the transcontinental railroad, and he produced a series of images that illustrated the engineering challenges of building a railway across the rugged western terrain. In 1870, he moved to Boston, where he opened a second studio. He reestablished himself as a celebrity portrait photographer. He received a gold medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia for his work. He died at the age of 50 in a railroad accident in Medford, Massachusetts.

Condition: Original tooled gilt Morocco; worn; detached from text block; generally minor wear to contents; with later partial typescript inventory of the portraits.