[Portrait of a Man]
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 neatly combined two widely desired but often contradictory goals of popular portraiture: likeness and flattery.