kmdennis
Worcester Belle, Claflin Studio, 1860s
This carte de visite was made by Charles Ripley Burnett Claflin, whose gallery at 188 Main Street, Worcester was active through the early 1860s.
The softly vignetted bust portrait and plain mount place it in the opening years of Cartomania, around 1861–1864, when American studios were first embracing albumen paper prints. The sitter’s modest dress and small feathered hat reflect transitional fashion of the period.
The woman who posed for Claflin wrote wittily:
"Will this suit you? If not, I have a dozen of my pupils' portraits you might choose from!
For your album, A Worcester belle."
This passage suggests the image was exchanged for placement in a friend's cdv album.
Photographed by Claflin, sitter unknown, early 1860s.
_
Cartomania refers to the extraordinary international craze for cartes de visite (small albumen photographs mounted on card stock) that swept Europe and the United States beginning around 1859–1860. Although the format had existed on paper since Disdéri’s 1854 patent, mass enthusiasm erupted only once studios began producing these portraits cheaply, quickly, and in large multiples.
For the first time, ordinary people could commission photographs that were affordable enough to distribute widely. Families ordered dozens at a time; friends exchanged them as social tokens; soldiers mailed them home during the Civil War; and albums specifically designed to hold CdVs became a standard fixture in middle-class parlors. Collecting celebrity portraits (actors, generals, politicians, writers) became a culture unto itself.
Cartomania was, in essence, a social revolution: it democratized portraiture, redefined how people represented themselves, and created a new visual economy in which photographs circulated like calling cards. Between roughly 1860 and 1870, cartes de visite became the most common photographic format in the Western world, eclipsing daguerreotypes and ambrotypes and laying the groundwork for later, more elaborate paper formats such as the cabinet card.
Worcester Belle, Claflin Studio, 1860s
This carte de visite was made by Charles Ripley Burnett Claflin, whose gallery at 188 Main Street, Worcester was active through the early 1860s.
The softly vignetted bust portrait and plain mount place it in the opening years of Cartomania, around 1861–1864, when American studios were first embracing albumen paper prints. The sitter’s modest dress and small feathered hat reflect transitional fashion of the period.
The woman who posed for Claflin wrote wittily:
"Will this suit you? If not, I have a dozen of my pupils' portraits you might choose from!
For your album, A Worcester belle."
This passage suggests the image was exchanged for placement in a friend's cdv album.
Photographed by Claflin, sitter unknown, early 1860s.
_
Cartomania refers to the extraordinary international craze for cartes de visite (small albumen photographs mounted on card stock) that swept Europe and the United States beginning around 1859–1860. Although the format had existed on paper since Disdéri’s 1854 patent, mass enthusiasm erupted only once studios began producing these portraits cheaply, quickly, and in large multiples.
For the first time, ordinary people could commission photographs that were affordable enough to distribute widely. Families ordered dozens at a time; friends exchanged them as social tokens; soldiers mailed them home during the Civil War; and albums specifically designed to hold CdVs became a standard fixture in middle-class parlors. Collecting celebrity portraits (actors, generals, politicians, writers) became a culture unto itself.
Cartomania was, in essence, a social revolution: it democratized portraiture, redefined how people represented themselves, and created a new visual economy in which photographs circulated like calling cards. Between roughly 1860 and 1870, cartes de visite became the most common photographic format in the Western world, eclipsing daguerreotypes and ambrotypes and laying the groundwork for later, more elaborate paper formats such as the cabinet card.