The William Munroe Special Collections acquires an unrecorded photograph of Ralph Waldo Emerson
With the support of the Concord Free Public Library Corporation and the generosity of its donors, the William Munroe Special Collections has acquired an unrecorded photograph of one of Concord's most famous residents, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The image is a circa-1860s carte-de-visite (CDV), a popular 19th-century format for small, card-mounted photographs the size of a calling card, taken from an original daguerreotype, the first widely used photographic method, circa-1848.
Picturing Emerson, the comprehensive Emerson iconography authored by former curator Leslie Perrin Wilson and the late Joel Myerson, enabled us to confirm it as one of only a very small number of known images of Emerson from the 1840s. The photograph was produced at a sitting in Liverpool in the 1840s, when Emerson was visiting England. The image is particularly striking because it shows Emerson reading in a relaxed pose, smiling. The same trip to England that produced this photograph also resulted in the 1848 painting of Ralph Waldo Emerson by David Scott in our collection, which shows Emerson in his more familiar pose at the lectern. Ebenezer R. Hoar, Elizabeth S. Hoar, and Reuben N. Rice donated the painting in 1873.
The Concord Free Public Library's William Munroe Special Collections holds significant collections of materials related to the Emerson family and Ralph Waldo Emerson's life and work. Include Emerson's essay "Culture" in manuscript, letters from Emerson to various correspondents, and an extensive collection of photographs. The Art Collection also features the Bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Seated sculpture of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Daniel Chester French.
An extensive new archival collection, a gift from the Children of David and Mary Emerson and currently being processed, offers an even broader view of multiple generations of the Emerson family of Concord, Massachusetts. Key highlights of the collection include correspondence from Amelia Forbes Emerson with members of the Emerson and Forbes families, friends, and cultural figures of the early 20th century; the travel journals of Ellen Tucker Emerson, daughter of Edward and Annie Emerson, and the sketchbooks by Edward Waldo Emerson, the only surviving son of Ralph Waldo Emerson; and photographs spanning four generations of the Emerson family.
Don’t stop here - the William Munroe Special Collections, including books, archival and manuscript materials, pamphlets, ephemera, broadsides, maps, photographs, and works of art, are available to academic researchers and the general public alike, both online and in-person at the Concord Free Public Library.