1320
to improvement and invention. By contrast, Hawes was
a proven artist whose mastery of light, composition,
mood and expression was unparalleled. Together, their
technological innovations considerably improved the
adaptability, application and clarity of the new medium.
Likewise, their commitment to art enhanced the standing
of the profession and signifi cantly advanced the aesthet-
ics of portraiture and the realism of documentary. Given
the daguerreotype’s fragile and singular nature, the
partnership’s legacy is equally remarkable, comprising
over 1,500 existent images.
Albert Southworth was born in West Fairlee, Ver-
mont, on 12 March 1811. After attending the Phillips
Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he tried teaching
before establishing a drugstore in Cabotville, Massa-
chusetts in 1839. Unhappy with his trade, he attended
a lecture early in 1840 on the principles and practice
of the daguerreotype. Delivered by François Gourand,
a pupil of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, the lecture
stimulated Southworth and persuaded him to contacted
Joseph Pennell, his friend and former roommate at Phil-
lips. Pennell was, at the time, assisting Samuel Morse
with his early photographic research and he invited
Southworth to New York to participate. Southworth’s
fi rst-hand experience of Morse’s experiments convinced
him of the value of the new medium. Displaying the rest-
less enthusiasm and fi nancial ambition that would mark
his career, he wrote his sister Nancy late in May:
You have read of the daguerreotype, an apparatus for tak-
ing views of buildings, streets, yards, and so forth. I had
an invitation to join Mr. Pennell and in getting one, and
partly to gratify my curiosity, and partly with the hope of
making it profi table, I met Mr. Pennell and I cannot in a
letter describe all the wonders of this apparatus. Suffi ce it
to say, that I can now make a perfect picture in one hour’s
time, that would take a painter weeks to draw.
(Robert Sobieszek, and Odette M. Appel, The Da-
guerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes, New York: Dover,
1980 (1976): xi)
Barely four months later, Southworth and Pennell
opened a daguerreotype studio in Cabotville. Utilizing
Alexander Wolcott’s patented wooden-box camera,
they produced commercial portraits while developing
and perfecting the daguerrean process. Although their
experiments proved successful—“we have very far
surpassed anybody in this country, and probably in the
world, in making miniatures”—Southworth and Pen-
nell fl oundered fi nancially. By the spring of 1841, the
partnership was in serious debt and Southworth decided
to relocate to Boston. With its prominent families, com-
mercial wealth and large population, Boston seemed
to Southworth the solution to the partnership’s main
fi nancial diffi culty: balancing commercial income with
the rising costs of invention.
By June 1841, the Southworth and Pennell stu-
dio—now operating under the name of A. S. Southworth
and Co.—was ensconced atop Scollay’s building in
Boston. In addition to portrait work, the company sold
equipment, provided instruction and contracted for the
manufacture of cameras, lenses, plates and cases. They
prospered temporarily in their new environment and
by 1842 had moved into a more permanent location on
Tremont Row, the heart of Boston’s artistic community.
Yet despite these small gains, the new industry’s fi nan-
cial landscape remained fi ckle. In 1843, Pennell left
the company to take up a teaching position at a private
school in the South. His place in the partnership was
fi lled shortly afterwards when Southworth made the
acquaintance of Josiah Hawes.
Josiah Hawes was born in East Sudbury, Massa-
chusetts on 20 February 1808. After working on his
family’s farm, he apprenticed as a carpenter. In 1829
took up painting:
Happening one day to come across an ordinary oil paint-
ing which I was admiring, a friend of mine asked me to
close one eye and look at the picture through my hand
with the other eye. The surpassing change which took
place, from its being an ordinary fl at canvas to a realistic
copy of nature with all its aerial perspective and beauty
so affected me, that from that time I was ambitious to
become an artist. (“Stray Leaves from the Diary of the
Oldest Professional Photographer in the World,” Photo-
Era, 16 (1906): 104–107)
For the next twenty years, he traveled New England
as an itinerant portrait painter. Quite by chance, Hawes
was in Boston in 1840 and attended the same Gourand
lectures as his future partner. Unlike Southworth, Hawes
was cautious. Unwilling to give up the steady income he
received on his travels, Hawes continued to paint until
1841, when he became an itinerant daguerreotypist. In
November 1843, Hawes was invited to join A. S. South-
worth and Co. (whose name was changed to Southworth
and Hawes in 1845). His fi nancial prudence and artistic
bent would perfectly complement Southworth’s eye for
the main chance.
While failing to shake its precarious fi nancial state,
the studio continued to achieve great artistic and social
success. They attracted such luminaries as Charles Dick-
ens (who, unfortunately, did not sit for a portrait), Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Edward Everett, Charles Goodyear,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Lola Montez, Lemuel Shaw, Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Zachary Taylor and Daniel Webster. In addition, they
produced important visual documents of such locations
as the Boston Athenaeum, Niagara Falls, the operating
room of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Mount
Auburn Cemetery, the Boston Navy Yard and Docks, the
Boston Common and the Emerson School for Girls. Un-
like their Boston contemporary John Plumbe Jr., neither
Southworth nor Hawes saw their studio as a potential