Medallion Portrait of a Woman (c. 1850): Art, History and Details

Medallion Portrait of a Woman (c. 1850) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811–1894); Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808–1901).

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: Medallion Portrait of a Woman
• Date: c. 1850
• Creator attribution: Albert Sands Southworth (American, 1811–1894); Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808–1901)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: daguerreotype, whole-plate
• Dimensions: Image: 20 x 15 cm (7 7/8 x 5 7/8 in.); Framed: 32.5 x 27.3 cm (12 13/16 x 10 3/4 in.); Matted: 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2002.30

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hinson, Tom. "Iconic Images." Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 47, no. 6 (July/August 2007): 3-6.

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.