I spent about an hour perusing a local antique store the other day. I always check out the camera section, but there's never anything of 19th century vintage (I fantasize about finding a low-priced brass barrel lens!). This day I was on the lookout for household items to be used as props, and though I did see a few things I liked, I just didn't want to pay the asking price. Just before leaving, I stumbled onto a couple of small stacks of old photographs, mostly cabinet cards and CDVs, and propped up on the shelf above was a small tintype of a young woman. It's not particularly striking or valuable, but I really wanted to spend some time looking at it, so I went ahead and bought it.
It's a small, poorly cut plate, about 3.7 x 2.6 inches; size-wise this puts it somewhere between 1/6-plate and carte de visite. The first thing that struck me when I picked it up was how very thin and flexible the metal is. I work with trophy aluminum, which is ,023 inch thick; the antique metal is half of that, about .011 inch thick. It's dented, but not badly; the emulsion and varnish appear to be intact.
Tintype of young woman, ca. early 1870s (color scan)
I scanned it in color so you can see the delicate rose tinting on the young woman's cheeks and the gold leaf on her earrings; there are remnants of gold leaf on her floral-shaped pendant as well, but it's hard to see in this scan. To date the image, I turned to Joan Severa's Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans & Fashion, 1840-1900 (an excellent resource by the way--I originally purchased the book to help date 19th century photographs for genealogy, but it's also a great reference for period fashion and portraiture trends, not to mention lots of great ambrotype and tintype images). From the style of her hair and bodice, the ribbon with pendant around her neck, the bangle bracelets on her wrists, and the pleated fabric at her cuffs and neckline, I feel reasonably confident that this picture is from the early 1870s. Here's another scan, in grayscale, that better shows what the photograph really looks like.
Tintype of young woman, ca. early 1870s (grayscale scan)
With plenty of my own darkroom mishaps fresh in my memory, I see oysters at the bottom left and upper right corners. I also see the bluish tint of unexposed collodion along the bottom edge (and there is additional collodion on the reverse along the same edge). While I see the dark corner of a plate holder in the lower right corner, I don't see it in the other corners, which leads me to assume that this image was one of several on a plate, taken at the same time, with multiple lenses, and then cut apart.
The longer I look at this young woman's portrait, the more I want to know the occasion--had she just graduated from a teaching college? Was she hoping to attract a suitor? Perhaps she was sending photographs to distant family members. While we'll never know who she was or where she lived, I'm thinking she enjoyed her photo session--sure seems like she's trying not to smile....