Untitled Stereograph of Three individuals viewing a large portrait [believed to be that of Chief Justice John Marshall]; Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1862, by M. B. Brady, in the Clerk's Office at the District Court of the District of Columbia.
Washington DC: Mathew Brady, 1862. This is one of a multiple original, few of which have survived. Stereograph/photograph. Format is approximately 6.75 by 3.25 inches for the card backing, and 6 inches by 3 inches for the images. Image has some wear and soiling. The name Burton is written in ink under one of the figures on the left image, identifying a young Burton Raynor Ross as one of the figures in the image. On the back is the pencil notation "Small [unclear] is Burton--he looks so cute". Colonel Burton R. Ross, (1845-1913) was a military instructor of the High School Cadet Regiment for 26 years. Col. Ross was for many years connected with the District of Columbia National Guard. He was at one time Lieutenant Colonel of the First Regiment. It is believed he might have served in the Civil War and also in the Spanish-American War. This is a a stereoscopic pair of separate photograph images, depicting left-eye and right-eye views of the same scene, as a single three-dimensional image using a device called a stereoscope. The word 'stereoscope' is now most commonly associated with viewers designed for the standard-format stereo cards that enjoyed several waves of popularity from the 1850s to the 1930s as a home entertainment medium. In 1849, Brady opened a gallery in Washington, D.C., to expand his business and have closer access to the nation’s political leaders. As new technology advanced photography from the daguerreotype to the glass plate negative process in the 1850s, Brady helped lead the way. The easily reproducible negatives brought mass marketing to photography in the form of card photographs known as cartes de visite (visit cards) and three-dimensional stereo views. In June 1838, the British scientist Charles Wheatstone published a paper describing a curious illusion he’d discovered. If you drew two pictures of something—say, a cube, or a tree—from two slightly different perspectives, and then viewed each one through a different eye, your brain would assemble them into a three-dimensional view. This was, he noted, precisely how our vision works; each eye sees a slightly different perspective. Wheatstone created a table-size device to demonstrate the effect, with a viewer that sent a unique image to each eye: the world’s first stereoscope. A decade later, the scientist David Brewster refined the design, crafting a hand-held device you could raise to your eyes. Insert a card with stereo images —a “view”—and presto! A scene came alive. Better yet, the photograph had recently been invented, which meant Brewster’s stereoscope could display not just crude hand drawings, but vivid images captured from real life. “All these inventions just dovetailed perfectly by mid-century,” notes Douglas Heil, a professor and author of The Art of Stereography. The world in a stereoscope seemed transcendent, hyper-real. “The first effect of looking at a good photograph through the stereoscope is a surprise such as no painting ever produced,” gushed Oliver Wendell Holmes, the American surgeon and author, in a 1859 Atlantic essay. “The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture. The scraggy branches of a tree in the foreground run out at us as if they would scratch our eyes out.” He even gave this type of imagery a name: “stereograph,” from the Latin roots for “solid” and “writing.” Holmes engineered a simplified stereoscope that could be made cheaply. He intentionally didn’t patent it, and this sparked an American stereography boom, as U.S. firms cranked out thousands of the gadgets. The device crossed all cultural and class boundaries: Intellectuals used it to ponder the mysteries of vision and mind, while kids merely goggled at the views. Eventually, the stereograph was killed off—by even newer, more bewitching media. Though the craze endured for over 60 years, by the 1910s, postcards had become the hot new photo item to share and collect. Then around the same time, radio arrived, and it permanently unseated the stereograph as social parlor-room entertainment. Condition: Good.
Keywords: Mathew Brady, Photograph, Stereograph, Burton Raynor Ross, Burton Ross, District of Columbia, Capitol, John Marshall, Supreme Court
[Book #83168]
Price: $1,000.00