Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1855): Art, History and Details

Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1855) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

It seemed a miracle that anyone could afford to have an accurate record of their own likeness or those of their loved ones. This portrait is an excellent example of the hundreds of thousands of portraits produced by commercial photographers in mid-nineteenth-century America. Small scale yet housed in an elaborately decorated thermoplastic case, it was intended to be carried by its owner or displayed on parlor tables or knickknack shelves.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of a Young Man
• Date: c. 1855
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: ambrotype with hand-tinting
• Dimensions: Overall: 8 x 6.9 x 2.3 cm (3 1/8 x 2 11/16 x 7/8 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2022.14

A detail from the museum

During the first decades of photography, portraits far outnumbered every other type of image.

Collection credit

Hershey Family Art Purchase Fund

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.