A Bride and Her Bridesmaids (1851 or later): Art, History and Details

A Bride and Her Bridesmaids (1851 or later) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808–1901); Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811–1894).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Southworth, a druggist, and Hawes, a carpenter and self-taught painter, operated a daguerreotype studio together in Boston that served the city’s elite. Masters of the aesthetic and technical aspects of the medium, they built the first skylight in Boston to supply a clear, strong light in their studio. Another of their innovations was the addition of an extra layer of silver to their plates to enhance the luminosity and level of polish of their daguerreotypes. This medallion portrait is an example of the most difficult and expensive portrait mode of the 1850s. A daguerreotype plate was first masked and then a perforated template was moved around to take separate exposures on the same plate using a mechanism Southworth patented.

Object facts

• Title: A Bride and Her Bridesmaids
• Date: 1851 or later
• Creator attribution: Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808–1901); Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811–1894)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: whole-plate daguerreotype
• Dimensions: Image: 19.9 x 14.8 cm (7 13/16 x 5 13/16 in.); Case: 21.7 x 16.5 cm (8 9/16 x 6 1/2 in.); Matted: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1999.171

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Mrs. Paul Wurzburger Donates Major Calder Mobile to Cleveland Museum of Art, Korean Painting, Japanese Ceramic, Italian Drawing and other Works Acquired” September 8, 1999, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• "Talks, Classes, and Experiences.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 56, no. 6 (November/December 2016): 38-39.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.