Samuel Broadbent
American, 1810-1880
Portrait of a Girl on a Studio Rail, 1860s, ca.
hand-colored salted paper print
7 3/8 x 5 ½ in.
SBMA, Museum Purchase
2014.63
COMMENTS
Samuel Broadbent began his career as a portrait painter and miniaturist in Hartford, Connecticut while in his teens, following in the footsteps of his father who was an artist as well as a physician. Samuel Broadbent was not only a fine portrait artist, he was one of the very first to learn the daguerreotype process in America. Friend and distant relative Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, introduced him to the daguerreotype process in 1840. Professor Morse, who had learned the process from Daguerre himself, taught it to American photographers Samuel Broadbent, Albert Southworth, Edward Anthony and Mathew Brady.
Throughout the 1840s Broadbent traveled around the southern United States as an itinerant daguerreotypist visiting many of the same locations where he had worked as a portrait painter and miniaturist. He is known to have had daguerreotype studios in different cities in Georgia; North and South Carolina; Baltimore, Maryland; and Wilmington, Delaware before settling in Philadelphia in 1851 where he worked for the next nearly thirty years.
New York Sun
April 10, 1841
DAGUERREOTYPE PORTRAITS, Taken from 10 o'clock A. M. until dark, at Professor Morse's studio, No. 136 Nassau street, opposite Brick Church, by S. BROADBENT. Professor Morse will generally be in attendance. Cloudy and even stormy weather present no obstacles to a successful result of the process.
By 1845 when Samuel opened a gallery in Columbia, South Carolina his ad carried the title “colored Daguerreotype portraits.” An 1853 newspaper advertisement for Broadbent & Co. reads, “Beautiful Landscape, Picturesque or Plain Backgrounds, at the option of the Sitter.”
Working primarily as a portrait photographer for almost four decades, Broadbent entered into a number of different partnerships, including with female daguerreotypist Sally [Sarah] Garrett Hewes, Henry C. Phillips, William Curtis Taylor, and fellow painter Frederick A. Wenderoth. He worked in a variety of photographic mediums and produced images utilizing a number of different processes. His daguerreotypes frequently employed a painted landscape background or centered the sitter within a window frame adorned with large leafy vines along one side. In addition to daguerreotypes, the Broadbent studio also produced ambrotypes and tintypes and successfully made the transition to paper photography. After Samuel Broadbent’s death in 1880, two of his sons continued his photography business until 1905. A Broadbent photography studio remained in Philadelphia until 1920.
Broadbent never completely gave up portrait painting, however, and his portrait of Philadelphia artist Thomas Sully was exhibited in 1869 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
- [Sarah J. Weatherwax, Curator of Prints and Photographs, The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107]
(pers. email, Sarah Weatherwax to Alan Griffiths, 29 June 2013)
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Following the Watkins to Weston exhibition (1992), Sinsheimer and former trustee Michael Wilson embarked on a multi-decade collaboration for exhibitions of the latter’s impressive collection of photography. Together they organized for SBMA four exhibitions of international 19th-century photography, each accompanied by scholarly catalogues. The first three were Travelers in an Antique Land: Early Travel Photography of Egypt (1994), Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato’s Photographs of China (2000), First Seen: Portraits of the World’s People (2005). During this time, Wilson gifted or helped fund the purchase of over 350 19th-century photographs to help build the Museum’s collection of early photography.
In Sinsheimer’s last two years at the museum, she worked toward another exhibition that would draw from Wilson’s collection, focusing on the North American use of the 19th century photographic process―the salted paper print. She also acquired works in this area, such as this Samuel Broadbent portrait. Though the exhibition was not realized, the 2015 publication Natural Magic: Salted Paper Prints in North America is a result of this project. A testament to the extraordinary use of the salted paper print in portrait and landscape photography, the book demonstrates the ways in which national identities in Canada, Mexico, and the United States were shaped through the use of the photographic invention.
- Ridley-Tree Gallery 2016