Josiah Hawes

Hawes left an account of what first drew him toward image making. According to the Getty’s artist materials, as a young man he looked at an oil painting with one eye and was struck by how the flat surface seemed to take on the depth of nature; the experience led him to aspire to become a painter^*1. After working as a carpenter and farmer, he studied painting and ivory miniature painting, and in 1840 attended a Boston lecture on the daguerreotype by François Gouraud^*1. The new silver-plate process offered a way to fix depth, light, and human presence—the qualities he had sought in painting—with a precision different from hand drawing.

In 1843 Hawes began operating a Boston portrait studio with Albert Sands Southworth. The West End Museum records that their Tremont Row studio used a large skylight to allow close control of light and shade, that Southworth’s sister Nancy handled hand-coloring, and that the business was run by a network of family members and staff^*2. An advertisement from around 1848 preserved by the National Portrait Gallery shows the studio presenting “character,” “expression,” and “light and shade” as qualities that distinguished its work^*3. The portrait studio was a place for producing likenesses, but it was also a site where optics, staging, customer interaction, and chemical processing were combined to construct a sitter’s image.

Whole Plates and Natural Light

Southworth & Hawes became known for large whole-plate daguerreotypes measuring 8½ × 6½ inches (about 21.6 × 16.5 cm). ICP explains that although plates of this size were technically difficult and expensive, the studio used them to render rich detail and tonal range and to position commercial portraiture within an artistic register^*4In the NGA’s The Letter two women are arranged around a letter in a triangular composition, creating a scene that departs from the conventional frontal bust portrait^*5. The physical support required to withstand a long exposure was absorbed into the composition as poses in which arms, shoulders, and gazes support one another. Whole plates were an expensive portrait format, and plates exceeding the standard size were exceptional enough to be reserved for wealthy or prominent clients^*26. Southworth & Hawes accepted the cost and difficulty in order to bring detail, light, and gesture together on a single large silver plate.

Pose and the Sitter

The National Portrait Gallery’s portrait of Daniel Webster uses a large plate to construct his identity as politician and orator through desk, books, window, and the direction of his body^*6. Southworth & Hawes adjusted lighting, posture, hand placement, and furniture as well as facial likeness, placing cues to social role and character within the portrait. In The Met’s group portrait of the Emerson School for Girls, twenty-five bodies are organized along diagonals and pyramidal groupings to hold a large number of people within one frame^*7. Individual faces and the order of the group are held together through the designed heights of seats, lines of sight, shoulder angles, and hand positions. In The Met’s portrait of shipbuilder Donald McKay, the broad whole-plate format includes clothing, chair, and hand placement, showing how a studio portrait could construct a wealthy client’s social position through detail^*23. For Miss Hodges of Salem, the studio made two costly whole-plate portraits of the same sitter. The Met suggests that the images may have been considered strong enough to hang in the public gallery of the studio’s reception room^*25. Large portraits could therefore serve both as commissioned objects and as display pieces demonstrating the studio’s visual skill.

Stereoscopy and Sequential Exposure

The partnership developed equipment as well as a portrait style. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History preserves a model of the camera for stereoscopic daguerreotypes patented by Southworth & Hawes in 1854^*8. The museum also holds the patent documentation for “Improvement in Taking Daguerreotypes for Stereoscopes,” showing that accurately matching binocular images formed part of the studio’s technical development^*9.Unidentified Woman in Nine Oval Views uses a sliding plate holder to expose a sequence of faces on the same silver plate, arranging them like the phases of the moon^*10. The studio also used the singular plate as a surface for experiments with time and multiple viewpoints, extending it beyond the single fixed likeness.

The Shared Name of Southworth & Hawes

Many major works are attributed to Southworth & Hawes, and it is not possible to separate, work by work, who operated the camera, determined the pose, or processed the plate. The Met’s Brattle Street urban view is likewise catalogued under the studio name together with Southworth and Hawes^*11. The shared brand, family involvement in coloring and management, operators’ labor, and interaction with clients supported a unified studio style, and major works continue to be collected under the joint name Southworth & Hawes.

Urban Views of Boston

Southworth & Hawes also turned the camera beyond the portrait studio. View Down Brattle Street from the Southworth & Hawes Studio is one of three images made from the studio window in 1855, recording the area around the church as the funeral procession of philanthropist Abbott Lawrence passed by^*11. The detail offered by large plates, developed for portraiture, was also used to record buildings, signs, and street layouts. A view from the Boston State House from around 1857–58 in Harvard’s collection is a salted-paper print, showing that the partnership also expanded into reproducible paper photography^*12. In Sculpture Gallery, Boston Athenaeum, a whole plate records a display room containing a figure of Diana and busts of Washington and Franklin. The Met connects the space to Boston’s cultural self-image as the “Athens of America”^*27. The studio used the same large-plate format for portraits of notable people and for records of exhibition interiors, documenting Boston’s cultural institutions as well as its citizens.

Ether Anesthesia and the Operating Room

In the late 1840s, Southworth & Hawes photographed operations using ether anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital. Research in medical history has examined the surviving daguerreotypes as exceptionally early photographic records of the use of anesthesia^*13. In studio portraiture, lighting and bodily arrangement could be controlled; in the operating room, doctors, patient, instruments, and architectural space had to be contained on a single plate. The precision of photography here acquired value as a historical record of medical procedure as well as in the making of refined portraits.

Emerson School for Girls

The Met’s Classroom in the Emerson School for Girls is an example of the partnership leaving the controlled studio and bringing a large camera into an actual classroom^*14. By placing window light, desks, walls, and students within one image, the interior itself—normally the background of a portrait—becomes a recorded social space. Such location work expanded the studio’s visual archive beyond prominent faces to include Boston’s educational, medical, and civic institutions.

Business Records and Technical Change

The George Eastman Museum’s Southworth & Hawes Records preserve correspondence, account books, sales records, equipment manufacture, photographic-supply business, technical experiments, and teaching materials, showing that the studio was a center for commerce and technical experimentation as well as image production^*15. The NGA’s page for Hawes includes salted-paper views of Boston Common, streets, and portraits from after the partnership’s peak, showing that Hawes adapted to paper photography as the daguerreotype declined^*16.Portrait of Three Girls is a carte-de-visite albumen silver print from the 1860s, printed on the reverse with “J. J. Hawes Photographer, 19 Tremont Row, Boston”^*17. The same Tremont Row business identity continued after the portrait market shifted from unique large plates to small reproducible cards. The Library of Congress also preserves a lithograph of Levi Woodbury made around 1848 after a Southworth & Hawes daguerreotype, an example of a singular silver-plate portrait being translated into another medium for circulation^*24.

Reassessment in 1939

In 1939, marking the centennial of photography’s invention, The Met exhibited and published the Hawes-Stokes Collection, presenting early American daguerreotypes including works by Southworth & Hawes^*18. The catalogue recorded plate dimensions, condition, sitters, and attributions, becoming a foundational source for later study of the works.

Attribution of the Medical Photographs

In the Ether Dome surgical images, later research has revised identifications of people and circumstances of exposure. The Getty’s The Silver Canvas compares the photographs with surgical records to reconsider longstanding misidentifications^*19. A family portrait including Hawes himself is also preserved by the National Portrait Gallery under the joint attribution Southworth & Hawes, providing physical evidence for relationships among Hawes, his relatives, and the studio^*20. Such reassessment has made the attribution of collaborative studio work and the historical circumstances of the medical photographs more precise.

Interior Images Made with Double Exposure

The Met’s Seated Man with Brattle Street Church Seen Through Window was made with two exposures on the same plate, using selective masking to combine the sitter and the church outside the window because both could not be rendered clearly in a single exposure^*21. Behind the apparently seamless portrait space are operations of exposure, masking, and background selection. The spatial continuity in Southworth & Hawes portraits was produced through this combination of exposure control, selective blocking, and designed backgrounds.

Large Plates and Collaborative Production

A recent National Portrait Gallery exhibition on the whole-plate format reconsidered large early photographic portraits within market and technical changes extending from luxury daguerreotypes to ambrotypes and tintypes^*22. The studio’s large plates depended on precise adjustments among skylight, pose, long exposure, and the reflective silver surface. Its experiments with stereoscopy and sequential exposure, and its later move into paper photography, arose from both technical efforts to improve the appearance of portraits and commercial responses to a changing market. Across Hawes’s long career, ambitious portrait making and the survival of a commercial studio remained tied to the same technical foundation.