Twin Babies (c. 1870): Art, History and Details

Twin Babies (c. 1870) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Davis Brothers (American).

The work and its context

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

Color photography was not widely available until the 20th century, but 19th-century photographs could be embellished with hand-applied paints or dyes for an extra charge. Hand coloring, often done by women, usually was limited to adding dabs of pink on lips and cheeks or gold on jewelry, but sometimes, as here, the entire surface would be covered to emulate a painting. The edges of this mount are covered with trial dabs of watercolor that would have been hidden by the mat. Once portraits leave the context of the family, the identities of the sitters are most often lost, as is the case for these twins. Since the Davis Brothers’ studio was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, around this time, one can assume the twins lived there.

Object facts

• Title: Twin Babies
• Date: c. 1870
• Creator attribution: Davis Brothers (American)
• Culture: America
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: salted paper print, hand-colored
• Dimensions: Image: 24 x 19.2 cm (9 7/16 x 7 9/16 in.); Paper: 29.2 x 25 cm (11 1/2 x 9 13/16 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2003.302

Collection credit

Gift of Charles Isaacs and Carol Nigro

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.