Little Portraits

QUESTION: I’ve noticed photographic portrait cards of Civil War soldiers  and other people, some of them famous, at flea markets and antique shows. Are these good to collect or do people buy them just to add ambiance to their antique decorating?

ANSWER: The portrait cards you’ve been seeing at flea markets and antique shows, known as  carte de visites, are, indeed, highly collectible, especially if they’re photographs of someone special or famous.

Parisian photographer, André Adolphe Eugène Disderi, patented the first carte de visites, literally meaning “visiting cards,” in 1854. Each card, onto which the photographer pasted a small albumen print,  measured 2-1/2 x 4 inches. They became all the rage for several decades during and after the Civil War, both here and abroad. However,  Disderi's format didn’t become widely used until nearly five years after he patented it.

But once his format caught on, it became an international standard. For the first time, people could exchange portraits, which they could then place into matching slots in specially made carte de visite photo albums. It didn’t matter where the recipient lived since they could purchase these albums everywhere. Another advantage to carte de visites was that people could mail them to each other. Usually each print came with a special mailing envelope, making it easy for the sender to just address it and pop it into the mail. Earlier daguerreotype and ambrotype photographs, both done on glass plates, required the sender to package them in bulky boxes with sufficient packing to prevent breakage during shipment. And because of their small size, carte de visites were also somewhat inexpensive.

Before the advent of carte de visites, people exchanged elaborate calling cards with their names engraved in decorative fonts. During the decade before the Civil War, it was the custom for a person to present his or her calling card whenever they visited someone. Life was very formal at the time, and no one received anyone they didn’t know without a calling card. Most people had a small basket or box in their parlor in which visitors could place their cards. A few photographers created and sold special photographic calling cards, but these weren’t standardized.

Using Disderi's method, a photographer could take eight negatives on a single 8 x 10-inch glass plate using a sliding plate holder and a camera with four lenses. That allowed him to make eight copies of the person’s portrait each time he printed the negative. This reduced production costs and allowed photographers to sell carte de visites at a reasonable price.

People were slow to purchase these new photo cards. However, legend says that after Disdéri published Emperor Napoleon III's photos in this format, the cartes gained widespread popularity.

Historians believe C. D. Fredericks introduced the carte de visite to the U.S. in New York late in the summer of 1859.  After carte de visites of Abraham Lincoln went on sale, they caught on like wildfire as soldiers and their families posed for them before war or death separated them. Carte de visites of famous people, like Ulysses S. Grant, became an instant hit, as people began collecting celebrity portraits of the time.

Civil War photographs are extremely collectible and have crossover appeal to collectors of both military and early photographs. From 1861 to 1865, the most method of portraiture was the tin-type and the carte de visite.

John L. Gihon of Chestnut St. in Philadelphia, was a portrait photographer who captured images of soldiers and prisoners at Fort Delaware off the shore of Delaware City, Delaware. His carte de visites eventually led to the production of early baseball cards for the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1870s. He died of an illness at only 39. Gihon charged his customers $2.50 for a sitting and six cards.

These little portraits were very important to Civil War soldiers. Since those, especially the Confederate prisoners, at Fort Delaware had to make do with what they had, they, usually officers, often borrowed pieces of uniforms, especially hats, and props, including swords, belts, sashes, from others confined with them so that they would appear as finely dressed as possible.

Prices of collectible carte de visites vary on condition, pose and subject. A carte de visite of surgeon Robert Hubbard, 17th Connecticut Infantry Volunteers, sold at auction for $374. Hubbard enlisted as surgeon of the regiment in August 1862 and became the acting medical director during the Battle of Gettysburg. He resigned in Dec. 1863.

A carte-de-visite of Dr. Mary Walker, taken by noted London photographer Elliott & Fry sold at auction for $1,380. She graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1855 and was an author and early feminist who gained distinction during the Civil War as a humanitarian, surgeon, and spy. Congress awarded her  the Congressional Medal of Honor in January 1866 on the personal recommendation of General Sherman. She refused to part with it when Congress revoked it for “unusual circumstance” in 1917. Dr. Walker died in 1919, but it wasn’t until 1977 when President Carter officially reinstated the award.

Collectors can find a variety of carte de visites both at flea markets and antique shows and in some antique shops and online. Prices vary from a few dollars to several thousand. They’re great items to collect, especially if a collector can find the special albums to hold them, often sold with their carte de visites removed.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 24,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about antique clocks in the Fall 2019 Edition, "It's That Time Again," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques & More Collection on Facebook.

A Taste of Elegance

QUESTION: From what period does this chair originate? The legs look quite modern. Is it a modern interpretation of an antique design?

ANSWER: This chair is a fine example of French Art Deco. As one of six of a set of dining chairs, it would have been placed under an equally simple, but elegant dining table.

Art Deco emerged in Paris just before World War I as a luxurious design style. But it wasn’t until after the war in the 1920s that Modernism appeared throughout Europe. Until the art world coined the name Art Deco later on in the 1960s, designers referred to the style as Arte Moderne which is French for Modern Art.

Art Nouveau furniture became a commercial failure. The intricate inlays and carvings made it too expensive for all except the very rich.  Concerned by competitive advances in design and manufacturing made in Germany and Austria in the early 20th century, French designers realized they could rejuvenate a their French furniture industry by producing luxurious pieces that a greater number of people could afford.

The founding in 1900 of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs (the Society of Artist-Decorators), a professional designers' association, marked the appearance of new standards for French design and production. Each year the association held exhibitions in which their members exhibited their work. In 1912, the French Government decided to sponsor an international exhibition of decorative arts to promote French design. However, they had to postpone the exhibition, originally scheduled for 1915, until after World War I.

Set at the Trocadero in Paris, near the Eiffel Tower, La Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern and Industrial Decorative Arts), held finally in 1925, was a massive trade fair that dazzled more than 16 million visitors during its seven-month run. On exhibit was everything from architecture and interior design to jewelry and perfumes, all intended to promote French luxury items. With such a long name, visitors began referring to the exhibition, and subsequently the design movement, as Art Deco. On display were a wide range of decorative arts, created between the two world wars.



The French Government invited over 20 countries to participate. All works on display had to be modern, no copying of historical styles of the past would be permitted. The stylistic unity of exhibits at the fair indicated that Art Deco had already become an international style by 1925.The great commercial success of Art  ensured that designers and manufacturers throughout Europe would continue to produce furniture in this style until well into the 1930s.

In France, Art Deco combined the traditional quality and luxury of French furniture with the good taste of Classicism and the exoticism of far-off lands. Many designers used sumptuous, expensive materials like exotic hardwoods, ivory, and lacquer combined with geometric forms and luxurious fabrics to provide plush comfort. Motifs like Chinese fretwork, African textile patterns, and Central American ziggurats provided designers with the exotic designs to play with to create a fresh, modern look. They depicted natural motifs as graceful and highly stylized. The use of animal skins, horn, and ivory accents from French colonies in Africa gave pieces exotic appeal.



French Art Deco furniture featured elegant lines and often had ornamentation applied to its surface. It could be utilitarian or purely ornamental, conceived only for its decorative value. It was the look that was important to many French designers, not the use or comfort of the piece. Even today, some pieces look as if their designers intended them to remain on display in a store window and not be used at all. At times it seemed as though the designers and their patrons were trying to escape the dismal reality of daily life at that time.

In 1937, the French government sponsored another trade fair, La Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (The International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in Modern Life). Less ambitious than the 1925 exhibition, this fair focused more on France's place in the modern world rather than on its production of luxury goods, thus marking the end of the French Art Deco Era.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 18,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about western antiques in the special 2019 Summer Edition, "That's Entertainment," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques & More Collection on Facebook.

Tobacco Behind Closed Doors

QUESTION: I found what looks like a small, shallow, porcelain vase at a fleamarket near my home. It’s almost too short to hold anything but flowers with very short stems and has a delicate floral design on the outside. Do you have any idea what this might be?

ANSWER: What you have is a ladies spit cup or spittoon. Chewing is one of the oldest ways of consuming tobacco. Native Americans chewed its leaves, often mixing it with lime. It became a popular pastime in the last decade of the 18th century and continued to be so until 1920. Today, the most visible evidence of tobacco chewing appears in baseball, but even that’s dying out as users succumb to throat cancer.

Though mostly men indulged in the habit of chewing tobacco, women, especially those in Victorian times, used it as well. In 1865, a traveler down South noted that seven-tenths of all people, both male and female,  over the age of 12 used tobacco in some form. Even children of 8 or 9 smoked. The habit increased in popularity after the Civil War as soldiers, who chewed tobacco to ease frazzled nerves on the battlefield, continued to do so after they came home.

Victorian women could chew and spit as well as men. These ladies usually abused tobacco and alcohol behind closed doors. And while they snuck outside and drank and smoked in the outhouse to avoid being caught by their husbands, they often chewed tobacco quietly around the house while doing their chores and needed something in which to deposit their spit.

After the Civil War, spittoons became a fixture in many places, including hotels, saloons, stores, and any other place where men chewing tobacco might congregate. These were large vessels made of brass or pottery with a broad rim into which the chewer tried to aim his spit, often with little success.

Woman, on the other hand, used a dainty spit cup—also called a lady’s cuspidor, toilette cup, or boudoir dish—to gracefully discard their sputum. Some looked like regular coffee or tea cups while others had fanciful shapes with fluted rims. Since ladies didn’t need to spit across the room, these cups often had decorative gold rims and base, and delicate, lady-like designs. Some came in the shape of little baskets or drawstring purses. English and French manufacturers, especially Limoges, made these lovely spit receptacles out of fine porcelain, and for plainer, everyday use, ironstone with flowered transferware patterns on both the inside and outside.

As chewing tobacco's popularity declined throughout the years, the spittoon became a relic. However, women found other uses for these cups. Pregnant women, who tended to salivate more, especially when they had nausea or heartburn, also used these cups. Even today, it’s common for Haitian women to carry around a spit cup while pregnant.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 18,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about western antiques in the special 2019 Summer Edition, "That's Entertainment," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques & More Collection on Facebook.