[Portrait of a Woman]
Not on view
The hand-painted photographic portrait found an enthusiastic audience in the American public; framed portraits like this one were a fixture of the middle-class parlor from the late 1850s to the early years of this century. Although dismissed by some highbrow painters and photographers, this hybrid art form flourished because it achieved two widely desired but often contradictory goals of popular portraiture: likeness and flattery.