Alice Montgomery (1850-1917) (1850): Art, History and Details

Alice Montgomery (1850-1917) (1850) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Enoch Long (American, 1823–1898).

The work and its context

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

Children have always been particularly cherished subjects for photography. Portraits were made to preserve the memory of their stages of growth and, in an age when long-distance travel was rare, to share with faraway relatives. And, for a sadder reason: in 1840 an estimated one-third of children died before age five. Photography offered grieving parents the opportunity to immortalize their children’s features. This tragic genre of photographs, later called “post-mortems,” often depicts the children in fine clothing, laying down with eyes shut, as if merely napping.

Object facts

• Title: Alice Montgomery (1850-1917)
• Date: 1850
• Creator attribution: Enoch Long (American, 1823–1898)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: daguerreotype, applied color
• Dimensions: Image: 4.2 x 5.5 cm (1 5/8 x 2 3/16 in.); Case: 8.1 x 9.4 x 1.5 cm (3 3/16 x 3 11/16 x 9/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1996.22

Collection credit

L. E. Holden Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.

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.