Senator George Ellis Pugh of Ohio (c.1857): Art, History and Details

Senator George Ellis Pugh of Ohio (c.1857) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Whitehurst Studio (American).

The work and its context

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

Photographing prominent politicians or other celebrities was an effective advertisement for the quality and prestige of a portrait studio. Whitehurst Studio opened in 1849 and soon had galleries in 12 cities, including Cincinnati, producing 30,000 daguerreotypes a year. In 1857 its Washington branch advertised it had photographed the entire Congress. To outflank competition from cheaper operators, Whitehurst, in1854, became a pioneer in America in the production of paper photographs. This is a rare example of an American salted paper print, one of the early paper print processes quickly succeeded by albumen prints. Pugh, a Cincinnati lawyer, represented Ohio in the US Senate from 1855 to 1861.

Object facts

• Title: Senator George Ellis Pugh of Ohio
• Date: c.1857
• Creator attribution: Whitehurst Studio (American)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 31.1 x 23.7 cm (12 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.); Paper: 31.1 x 23.7 cm (12 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.); Matted: 55.9 x 45.7 cm (22 x 18 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1997.194

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Major European Porcelain Crucifix, Pre-Columbian Figure, and Other Works Added to CMA Collection,” December 3, 1997, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.

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.