Several posts ago I mentioned that I had bought an envelope of theatrical photographs. Well, they arrived yesterday, and this is the first post from that collection.
This cabinet card is, to put it mildly, damaged. The bottom margin that would have identified the photographic studio, and quite possibly, the actress is gone, and I'm not willing to spend days searching images of nineteenth century theatrical photography looking for a match. While it would be a time consuming exercise, it wouldn't necessarily be a pointless search. It was a fairly common practice during the cabinet card era for famous performers to drop by the local photo studio and have pictures taken. As I've noted in some of my previous posts, photographers would provide free pictures in exchange for the right to sell those same pictures to the general public.
Now, I'd like to recommend one of my favorite online photographic resources. broadway.cas.sc.edu (You can click just below the title.) It's a great site documenting theatrical photographs from the Broadway stage. The collection is housed at the very un-Broadway University of South Carolina.
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