Frontiers of collecting

Jewelry containing tiny photographs and fantastical cases now empty of the visiting cards they once contained are frontiers of collecting that have found their passionate advocates. One of the authors of Antique Photographic Jewelry is Patricia Abbott, a photographer, the founding secretary of the Daguerreian Society, and the owner of a featherless African gray parrot who has been "known to eat leather daguerreotype cases and daguerreian jewelry." The other principal author is Larry J. West, "an acquisition and financing intermediary in the direct marketing industry" and a collector of photographs and photo jewelry.

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Their book is an opulent production with padded covers reproducing, hugely enlarged, elaborately engraved and embossed gold covers of a tiny photo booklet of 1859. The opening endpapers show the enlarged portraits of a man and a woman inside the photo booklet. The closing endpapers show the same portraits actual size, no larger than postage stamps. Next to each page number is a tiny crimson heart, reflecting the subtitle, Tokens of Affection and Regard, and the edges of the pages are gold.

Neither photograph nor jewelry collectors thought photo jewelry worth their while until the mid-1990s. This changed when members of the Daguerreian Society began to wear photo jewelry to the annual meeting and examples started to attract significant interest on eBay.

The authors have divided photo jewelry into fifteen categories that include buttons, stickpins, rings, watch fobs, bracelets, and earrings. The photographs incorporated were daguerreotypes (silverplated copper), ambrotypes (glass with a collodion emulsion), tintypes (lacquered iron with a collodion emulsion), and the many types of paper prints.

The tiny photograph was the perfect successor to the painted miniature, and its popularity was legitimized by Queen Victoria, who wore a variety of photo jewelry, although she could have afforded an equal number of miniatures on ivory. A ring with the head of a loved one, or a double-sided locket with two familiar faces were discreet remembrances, but it does seem an exaggeration to assemble a bracelet of six portraits, each with a lock of hair at the back. The example illustrated was obviously the subject of some reflection, for the portraits represent Louis Agassiz, Alexander D. Bache, Benjamin Pierce, John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams, and a man named Sauss. All supplied hair except John Quincy Adams, who did not have a great deal. His portrait is backed with a lock of Daniel Webster's hair.

A somewhat sinister memento, with a life of its own, is a large, clunky necklace of gutta-percha, a form of hard rubber: It incorporates the portrait of a grim young man in a broad frame, while the necklace itself is a series of fat links joining large and small flat diamond shapes and a single flat rectangle. When acquired, the badly oxidized daguerreotype portrait was cleaned up and resealed behind its glass. Several weeks later, the oxidation had returned, and as a last resort the picture was coated with a nonoxidizing polymer. Six months later the oxidation had returned again without explanation. The collector comments: "No matter what we do by way of preservation, the piece seems to be in mourning and headed to an inevitable death."

Among the other oddities is a button for an abolitionist's coat with a photograph of two hands, one black and one white, resting amiably on top of each other. A pin in a sinuous pinchbeck border contains a trio of men in their best clothes, one of whom holds a document. A likely possibility is the celebration of a business deal. A large red glass perfume bottle is stoppered with the daguerreotype of a lady in a gold mount. It was found in 2001 in a booth standing in an open field at the Brimfield, Massachusetts, antiques fair. "The moral for collectors: great pieces still surface unexpectedly. Never stop looking!" The enthusiasm of these author-collectors is both pervasive and infectious.

With this in mind they have provided an overview of the photo-jewelry industry with profiles of a dozen nineteenth-century photographic galleries, a chapter entitled "Identification, Collecting, and Research," an appendix of "Helpful Documents," a glossary, index, and pocket biographies of the authors.

Antique Photographic Jewelry: Tokens of Affection and Regard, by Larry J. West and Patricia A. Abbott (West Companies, by e-mail: photo graphicjewelry@yahoo.com), $125.00 (hardcovers).

Owing to a production error, a truncated review of the following book appeared in our December issue. The complete review follows, with apologies to the author and our readers.

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