Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at an image from the early days of photography that was taken by a man usually remembered for something different: inventing the telegraph. We’ll also find out why the speaker of the Assembly wants state lawmakers to get paid even when the state budget is late, as it is this year.
The man in the dim, muddy image isn’t the reason the little portrait could sell for as much as $60,000.
It’s the man who took it — Samuel F.B. Morse, who is mainly remembered as the inventor of the telegraph.
Long before there were camera shops and film, there were daguerreotypes, images made using a photographic process invented in the 1830s by the French artist Louis Daguerre. Morse was an early adopter despite the limitations of daguerreotyping. A single image took minutes to expose. Fraction-of-a-second shutter speeds were unheard-of. So were shutters, buttons to release them and flashbulbs to light dark rooms. The picture was taken by pulling a cap off the lens and putting it back on later.
Still, daguerreotypes caught on in the United States in the 1840s, and portrait studios seemed to be everywhere. “You could walk along Broadway here in New York City, and there were daguerreotype studios where you could go in and have a portrait made and, within a couple of hours, have a portrait you could take home,” said Darius Himes, the head of photographs at Christie’s, which will show the Morse daguerreotype next week and sell it next month.
By the 1850s, the historian Marvin D. Schwartz wrote, there were more daguerreotype studios in New York than in all of England. “Scenes, events and celebrities were the subjects of some early pictures,” Schwartz wrote, “but the greatest amount of effort went into producing cheap portraits of just plain people.”
Daguerreotypes were usually kept in little cases. “It was a beautiful little thing to carry around — a memento,” Himes said, and thousands of Civil War soldiers carried daguerreotypes of their wives or girlfriends in pockets close to their hearts. The cases also served a practical purpose, because a daguerreotype is an image on a silver-coated sheet of copper. “The lid would seal it, to keep it from becoming oxidized,” he said. “This is silver, and as you know from your grandmother’s cutlery, silver tarnishes.”
Another limitation: Daguerreotypes could not be reproduced easily. There were no negatives.
“Early photography was as much a mix of science as art,” Himes said, and it had to be learned by trial and error. “There were no firm formulas that existed yet, so there was a lot of early experimentation about how to perfect the craft,” Himes said.
Morse learned daguerreotyping from Daguerre himself. Morse was in Paris in 1839, promoting the telegraph, and arranged a meeting. He immediately became an enthusiast. According to Sarah Kate Gillespie, the author of “The Early American Daguerreotype,” Morse raved about the possibilities in the first firsthand account of daguerreotyping published in the United States. Daguerreotypes of interior scenes were, he declared, “Rembrandt perfected.”
Morse briefly operated a portrait studio, which he opened with a chemist and physician named John William Draper in a building owned by the University of the City of New York (now New York University). Draper is remembered for taking an early photograph of the moon.
Morse and Draper charged $5 a picture. They could make portraits only on sunny days. On cloudy days, they demonstrated the process to aspiring daguerreotype creators.
Before long, The New-York Observer, a newspaper that had been started by Morse’s brothers, said that he was “improving upon the discovery of M. Daguerre.” Gillespie noted that this was a way of asserting that while daguerreotyping was not an American invention, “Americans have, in less than a year, made it better.”
But the studio did not last long. Draper, already a professor of undergraduates, left Morse in the fall of 1840 and went on to help start the university’s medical school. Morse gave up the studio a short time later.
The Morse daguerreotype has a mat and a gold foil stamped with the word “Morse.” It is one of some 200 lots in the June sale of photographic works from the collectors Lynn and Yann Maillet, who began amassing daguerreotypes in the late 1960s, Himes said.
“They were almost like private-eye detectives,” he said. “They were great at looking for and discovering descendants of these early photographers” and buying images that had been stashed away for generations. Only one other Morse daguerreotype is known to exist, a portrait of a young man. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though not on view.
Weather
Expect a mostly cloudy day with a slight chance of afternoon showers and a high around 53 degrees. Overnight, there is a 60 percent chance of rain, with a low around 40 degrees.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Saturday (Passover).
The latest Metro news
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Police commissioner now, mayor later? “I don’t see it,” says Jessica Tisch, who took over the New York Police Department five months ago. Her success will be defined by how well she overhauls the department and how much the crime rate comes down, both tall orders.
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A teachers’ union spends big: The president of the New Jersey Education Association, Sean Spiller, is running for governor. He has something the other Democratic candidates don’t: a $35 million blank check from a super PAC with close ties to the union.
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ICE offices at Rikers: City Hall issued an executive order that will allow the federal immigration authorities to reopen office space at the Rikers Island jail complex. The City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, who is running to unseat Mayor Eric Adams, called the move “deeply concerning.”
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Hobby Lobby’s first Manhattan store: The crafts retailer, whose owners are vocal about their evangelical beliefs, is coming to the TriBeCa neighborhood, which is known for sky-high rents and liberal politics.
When the state budget is late, lawmakers still want their paychecks
The speaker of the State Assembly, Carl Heastie, says lawmakers should get paid even when the state budget is late, as it is this year.
Under a provision of state law, lawmakers’ paychecks are held up until a deal is reached. Heastie has introduced a bill that would take away a governor’s ability to force a budget agreement by using that provision as leverage.
At issue is governors’ habit of squeezing policy priorities, like criminal justice reforms, into state budget negotiations when there is no time to debate them.
“Governors get to throw in whatever they want — they still get paid,” Heastie said. “But then if the Legislature takes up their prerogative to want to have any say in the policy, we run out of time, and they’re like, ‘Oops, you don’t get paid.’” The budget was due on April 1.
Under Heastie’s proposal, lawmakers would go unpaid during overtime budget talks only if negotiations remained focused on fiscal matters. He said the proposal, first reported by Gothamist, would put the executive and legislative branches of government on an even playing field when it came to state policy.
Many members of the Democratic-controlled Assembly supported the proposal, although they said the measure was less about pay than about fairness. “It’s not our job to just quietly capitulate to what any governor wants,” said Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Assemblyman William Barclay, the Republican minority leader, called Heastie’s bill “the clearest signal of how bad New York’s budget process has gotten.” But he declined to say whether he would support it. In the State Senate, many expressed frustration that Gov. Kathy Hochul had front-loaded budget talks with policy discussions.
Avi Small, her press secretary, scoffed at Heastie’s proposal. “If the highest-paid state legislators in America are worried about their paychecks, there’s a much easier solution: Come to the table and pass a budget that includes Governor Hochul’s common-sense agenda,” he said. State legislators earn $142,000 a year, the most in the United States. Hochul, whose salary is $250,000, is the highest-paid governor.
Hochul has shown no sign of feeling pressure to pass a budget.
“I’m truly not in any rush — I will stay here as long as it takes to get the budget I believe delivers for New Yorkers,” she said last week, adding later, “Summers are nice here, too.” A budget deal is not expected until next week at the earliest.
METROPOLITAN diary
Wedding Plans
Dear Diary:
It was a rainy day, and I was heading uptown on a crowded M104 bus.
A woman sitting toward the back was talking loudly on her phone about her upcoming wedding, describing the decorations, the venue, her dress and the guests.
As she got up to get off the bus, a voice shouted from the front: “Are we all invited?”
— Emily T. Dunlap
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post An Early Photograph With a Famous Creator Goes Up for Auction appeared first on New York Times.
