Christie’s will offer The Maillet Daguerreotype Collection in an online sale open for bidding from 12 to 26 June, on view in its Rockefeller Center galleries in New York from 21 to 26 June. Highlights were shown earlier during the spring Photographs preview exhibition in New York, from 10 to 16 April.
Containing more than 200 lots, it is one of the most important collections of daguerreotypes to reach the market in the past 25 years, with rare works by Samuel F. B. Morse, Robert Cornelius, John Ruskin, Platt D. Babbitt, Henry Fitz Jr., Plumbe, Southworth and Hawes, and Francis Grice, among others. Beginning in the 1960s, the Maillets collected daguerreotypes with depth and breadth, gathering key early American works alongside European examples. The collection has never before been on public view.
Grant Romer, photographic historian and founding director of the Academy of Archaic Imaging, noted that the Maillets recognized early that daguerreotypes were undervalued and often dismissed as curiosities in antique shops, and built a collection spanning the full history of the medium that would be nearly impossible to replicate today. The daguerreotype, announced to the world in 1839, arose from a collaboration between the Frenchmen Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Mandé Jacques Daguerre that began in 1826. Each captures a detail-rich positive image on a silver-coated copper plate and is a unique object, with no negative.
The sale is headlined by Morse’s portrait of an unidentified gentleman from 1839, made months after the process was announced in Paris. Morse, best known for inventing the wire telegraph and for his Romantic-era paintings, met Daguerre in Paris in 1838 and became an enthusiastic advocate for the invention in America. He was among the first Americans to produce a daguerreotype on American soil; the only other known work by him resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Another highlight is a rare whole-plate scene by Henry Fitz Jr. of the Washington Monument in Baltimore, which still stands today. Fitz had a deep understanding of optics, helped develop the first patented American camera, and established the first studio in Baltimore in 1840. The sale also contains more than two dozen plates by Southworth & Hawes, including Miss Hodges of Salem, circa 1848 to 1850, occupational portraits, and views of the California gold rush, along with Niagara Through Mist in Summer, 1850, by Platt D. Babbitt and La Giralda Cathedral Seville, 1848, by Francisco de Leygonier.
(Press Release)
