NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s announced The Maillet Daguerreotype Collection. The online sale will be open for bidding 12–26 June, and on view in Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries from 21–26 June. Highlights from the collection will be on view during the spring Photographs preview exhibition in New York, April 10-16.
Containing over 200 lots, this is one of the most important collections of daguerreotypes to come to market in the past 25 years, with significant and rare works by Samuel F. B. Morse, Robert Cornelius, John Ruskin, Platt D. Babbitt, Henry Fitz Jr., Plumbe, Southworth and Hawes, Francis Grice, and more. Beginning in the 1960s, the Maillets pursued collecting daguerreotypes with a fierce passion. Well-known within the field and yet resolutely private, the Maillets amassed a collection with great depth and outstanding breadth, with key early American works and stunning European examples. This collection, never before on public view, will now be offered in a stand-alone auction at Christie’s New York.
Grant Romer, Photographic Historian and Founding Director, Academy of Archaic Imaging, says, "The Maillets recognized early on that daguerreotypes were significantly undervalued, often dismissed as mere curiosities in antique shops. With rare insight and discernment, they swiftly built a private and exceptional collection spanning the full history and evolution of the medium. Today, the depth and breadth of such a collection would be nearly impossible to replicate.”
The daguerreotype was the “first truly practical photographic system,” announced to the world in 1839 and born of a collaboration between Frenchmen Joseph Nicephore Niepce and Louis Mande Jacques Daguerre that began in 1826. Daguerreotypes capture a detail-rich positive image on a silver-coated copper plate. Miraculous by nature, and due to the technical process that creates them, they are unique objects; there is no negative.
Headlining the sale is Samuel F. B. Morse’s portrait of an unidentified gentleman from 1839, made just months after the public announcement of the process was made in Paris. Most notable for his invention of the wire telegraph as well as his Romantic-era paintings, Morse met Daguerre in Paris in 1838 while securing a French patent for the telegraph and was an enthusiastic voice in America for Daguerre’s miraculous invention. Morse was one of the very first Americans to produce a daguerreotype on American soil and pioneered its use for portraiture. He produced numerous daguerreotypes, however the only other known extant work by Morse resides in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; all others have been lost to time.
Another highlight of the collection from the pioneering era of photography is a rare whole plate scene by Henry Fitz Jr. of the Washington Monument in Baltimore which is still standing today. Fitz had a deep understanding of optics and was integral to development of the first patented American camera. He learned daguerreotypy in New York in late 1839-1840, and in June of that year, established the first studio in Baltimore.
The sale contains more than two dozen plates by Southworth & Hawes, including Miss Hodges of Salem, c. 1848-1850, occupational portraits, views of the California gold rush, and a wide variety of American and European views, such as Niagara Through Mist in Summer, 1850 by Platt D Babbit., and La Giralda Cathedral Seville, 1948 by Francisco de Leygonier.
