617
Hamber, Anthony J., A Higher Branch of the Art: photographing
the fi ne arts in England, 1839–1880, Amsterdam, Gordon
and Breach, 1996.
Pohlmann, Ulrich, “Harmonie zwischen Kunst und Industrie”;
Silber und Salz, Agfa Foto-Historama; Cologne, Munich,
Hambourg, 1989–1990.
GREAT EXHIBITION, NEW YORK
(1853–1854)
The Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations took place
in New York City from 14 July 1853 to 1 November
- It was the fi rst international exhibition (or, loosely
speaking, “world’s fair”) to take place in the United
States. The exhibition has ever since been popularly
known as the Crystal Palace Exhibition. The New York
exhibition was directly modeled on the London Great
Exhibition that took place in the Crystal Palace, Sir
Joseph Paxton’s monumental greenhouse-like edifi ce of
glass and cast iron, in Hyde Park in 1851. In New York,
the architects Georg Carstensen and Charles Gildemeis-
ter designed a variant on the Paxton building. (Exhibi-
tions at this time typically took place within a single
building. Later in the century Paris would pioneer the use
of a campus of several buildings to house an exhibition.)
The New York Crystal Palace comprised 1,800 tons of
iron and 15,000 panes of glass, and its 123-foot-high
dome was the highest that had been built in the United
States. The exhibition building was located in what is
now known as “midtown” Manhattan, but which in the
1850s was the northernmost settled area on Manhattan
island. The precise location was Reservoir Square (now
known as Bryant Park), to the immediate west of the
Croton Distributing Reservoir in the block bounded
by Fifth Avenue, 42nd Street, Sixth Avenue, and 40th
Street. There were 4,390 exhibitors at the Crystal Pal-
ace, exhibiting industrial products, consumer goods,
artworks, machines, carriages, scientifi c instruments,
recent inventions, agricultural equipment, guns, fi re
engines, clocks, telegraph machines, ships and boats,
minerals and metals, dry goods, and, not least, photo-
graphs and photographic equipment. With the opening
in 1825 of the Erie Canal, New York had solidifi ed its
standing as the most important port city of the United
States, as well as the country’s most important fi nancial,
mercantile, commercial, and industrial center. Europe-
ans had begun to say that New York was, or was destined
to be, the “London of the New World.” Seeking to show
the city off to the world, New York businessmen, chiefl y
allied with the Chamber of Commerce of the State of
New York, and other civic leaders organized the exhibi-
tion with the backing of the municipality.
The exhibition brought many visitors to New York
City, and most New Yorkers attended the exhibition at
least once. Both Mark Twain and Walt Whitman visited
it, and both were suitably impressed; Whitman visited
on many occasions. The tourist boom occasioned by the
exhibition led to the construction of numerous hotels,
several of them on an unprecedentedly grand scale. The
national importance of the exhibition was underscored
by the fact that President Franklin Pierce delivered a
speech at the Crystal Palace on its opening day.
The exhibition coincided with the immense and sud-
den popularity of photography, especially daguerreoty-
py, in New York. The New York Daily Times of 29 March
1853 wrote of one exhibit that it was “arranged...in such
a manner as to be a daguerreotype of the resources of
every State in the Union.” The metaphorical use of
“daguerreotype” is a clear indication that photography
had very rapidly worked its way into the collective
consciousness of New Yorkers. Also, by 1853 popular
New York magazine illustrations often were lithographs
from daguerreotypes. The distinguished Putnam’s maga-
zine in that year presented a series called “New York
Daguerreotyped,” showing among other things images,
destined to become iconic, of the Crystal Palace, a build-
ing that may have been among the fi rst in America to be
designed to be photogenic, and certainly one of the most
extensively photographed new buildings in America to
be constructed during the fi rst two decades following
the New York painter and inventor Samuel F.B. Morse’s
introduction of daguerreotypy to the United States.
The common usage of the new word “daguerreotype”
underscores how in the fourteen years separating the
exhbition from the introduction of daguerreotypy to
America the medium had become so widely and wildly
popular in the United States that historians have been
hard pressed to explain the phenomenon. Morse intro-
duced the daguerreotype to New York approximately
one month after Louis Daguerre had fi rst demonstrated
his invention in Paris. From that point on, the United
States took the lead in daguerreotype production and
in the refi nement of daguerreotype technique. This
was amply evidenced in the New York Crystal Palace
exhibition. Indeed, two years before the New York ex-
hibition, Americans had won the majority of awards for
daguerreotypy presented at the London Crystal Palace
exhibition.
In discussing the Great Exhibition, Scientifi c Ameri-
can (20 August 1853) noted, “It is generally understood
that the best daguerreotypes are produced in the United
States: The fame of our operators is world-wide.” About
forty deguerreotypists exhibited at the New York Crystal
Palace, and it appears they were all Americans. “Prob-
ably the best daguerreotypes in the world may be found
here....There are good pictures by all the exhibitors, but
the palm will be borne away by our New York artists.”
In the number of the Photographic Art-Journal (June
1853) coinciding with the exhibition’s opening, it was
noted of New York that “The daguerrean galleries of this
city are among the primary objects of interest to visitors,