Featured Acquired this tinted daguerreotype

I bought this off eBay and it is my first colorized/tinted daguerreotype. The case has seen better days and the image has accumulated quite a bit of dust. Quite a nice image but as the listing noted she has very large hands! Interesting to see and adds to the character of it.

 

look at the paws on that gal......ready to work on the farm !!!

 

What color do you guys think the dress was originally? Black? But then tinted blue/greenish?

 

The camera is positioned too low in my opinion.

 

black would be my guess

 

I'm not totally convinced that is a "Gal".

 

Possibly a farmer? No idea but she seems proud of her hands displaying them like that? Intriquing photo, hopefully theres an ID behind it

 

She may well be a musician. I am "almost" seeing her as a musician, perhaps a harpist -- and that would mean a full-size harp which sat on the floor and she plucked the strings as the harp leaned between her legs.

I'm guessing some of you have forgotten the finger exercises one does before playing a piano. I remember being 9 years old when I began my piano lessons. One of the exercises we had to do when we first sat on the piano bench was to spread our fingers and two-by-two open our fingers and stretch them by putting them around our arm halfway between our wrist and the elbow.

 

Daguerreotypes were only sensitive to the blue end of the spectrum, which makes it very difficult to interpret the original colors.

"Daguerreotypes are orthochromatic, they are very insensitive to warm colors. Reds, oranges and yellows come out unnaturally dark, and blues come out very light. On the street you don’t have much trouble with it, but with people it can be a problem if they have suntans. It can actually take three stops more exposure to do a portrait of someone with a tan. As a matter of fact in the early days when exposure times were many minutes it was suggested that people should powder their faces with flour in order to be photographed."
- from an article by Jerry Spagnoli, a modern daguerreotypist
http://www.jerryspagnoli.com/Extras/Resources/How the World Looks web.pdf

 

Early Victorian. And what an interesting dress that is. With that long, u-shaped bodice. Here's something similar from 1847 but v-shaped and not as exaggerated.

Debora

 

This piece immediately made me think of this episode of Seinfeld.

"She had man hands."

 

ALMOST making me think 'post-mortem'......no life in those eyes and NO expression in the face......hands look like blood might be pooling in them too....or something like that......IMHO....

 

Wow, I don't think I'd go as far as to say she is post-mortem.... Post-mortem daguerreotypes are very obvious. Maybe she just went with a blank face because sitting there for 15 minutes wasn't fun.

There are 14 day returns so if I am not pleased with it in person, I will be sending it back.

 

She's a corn fed country girl with those shovel hands.

 

Absolutely not post mortem. My eyes often look expressionless in photos, and I'm still alive!

 

Hey, Fig! Any chance that the size of the hands (being closer to the camera than the rest of her) has been exaggerated by the lens?

 

Yes, there is a chance of that. I've noticed large hands in other older photos. But I've never done a study on that, it's just something I've thought of.

 

Thanks. I was thinking that I remembered an earlier conversation on the subject - but it may have been over yonder and years ago.