Thompson, of Amesbury Mass., was known as Whittier’s “official” photographer—Haverhill Public Library

Although uncredited in Sun and Shade, this archive has discovered this late portrait of Whittier was taken by Amesbury, MA photographer William Cushing Thompson in 1890, two years before his death. Another example of this gravure located through our research bears the imprint of The Photogravure and Color Co.—successors to the N.Y. Photogravure Company in 1896.

The following commentary appeared on the index page for this portrait: “Mr. Whittier was born in Haverhill, Mass., on December 17th, 1807, in the old Whittier farm house, situated in a valley surrounded by wooded hills, remote from other habitations. The house was built in 1688, and is a typical old New England structure, with massive oak beams, low walls, and quaint iron hinges and fastenings. Here he remained until he was I9 years of age, picking up such scraps of education as fell from the pedagogue who “boarded round” during the three months session of the village school. He acquired the knowledge of reading, at least, and this placed within his mental reach his father’s collection of melancholy, depressing lives of saints and martyrs, and the heaviest and dullest book of any age, “The Davideis.” At this period, a neighbor, taking a fancy to the lad, loaned him a copy of Burns, and he read “Highland Mary.” What a jump from the blood curdling brimstone which had been his pablum from his earliest youth! This started the slumbering poetic fire which was in him.

A year or two later found him doing editorial work on several different journals, and in 1831 he published a volume entitled, “Legends of New England in Prose and Verse.”

He was elected a member of the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835; and in 1836 became one of the secretaries of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He was an earnest and constant abolitionist all his life, suffering contumely and bodily harm in the early days of the Free Soil Party.

His first volume of verse was published in 1847, since which time, with the exception of Margaret Smith’s Journal, and some minor pieces, he has devoted himself to poetical writing. His “Snow Bound ” had an enormous sale the year of its publication, I866, and now, nearly 30 years after, it is one of the “live” books in the trade.

A year or two later, some of his poems were collected and published, with many fine illustrations, by the firm of Ticknor & Fields. This had a very large sale, and though this volume is still on the market, the early Ticknor & Fields edition commands high prices owing to the magnificent printing (the work of the famed University Press of Cambridge, Mass.) and superb paper. Mr. Whittier died peacefully and without pain, on the 7th of September, 1892, at Hampton Falls, N. H. Of the grand quintette that made New England famous the world over—Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes— only the latter remains, who, though long passed four score of years, is still the same genial “autocrat.”

William Cushing Thompson: 1839-1917

“William Cushing Thompson operated his Amesbury studio between 1869 and 1893. It was located for at least some of this time at Market and Main Street. The Bulletin of Photography (1917) reported that Thompson was in the photography business when the civil war started and he temporarily quit his career to join the Union army.

This cabinet card of John Greenleaf Whittier is dated 1890 on the lower margin. It was taken by Amesbury, Mass. commercial photographer William Cushing Thompson, 1839-1917. (Photo: Internet)

According to the article, he stayed in the war until it ended. Thompson entered the war as a private and mustered out as a sergeant. He served in Company A of the 48th Massachusetts Infantry. Some of Thompson’s photographs are in the collections of the New York Public Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Thompson was born and died in Newburyport. He is buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Newburyport.”—The Cabinet Card Gallery

Sun & Shade: An Artistic Periodical

“Within the covers of Sun and Shade…We shall especially endeavor to encourage the artistic side of direct photography in all its phases,”—Ernest Edwards, president & publisher, 1889

In July, 1888, the first issue of Sun & Shade: A Photographic Record of Events, was published in New York City by The Photo-Gravure Company. Essentially a high-class art periodical, each issue featured eight or more beautiful hand-pulled photogravures as well as plates printed in photogelatine, (collotype) and halftone. These were collected within a stapled, folio-sized magazine issued monthly.  The subject matter included the work of leading amateur and professional photographers, as well as works of art—many from the galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The December issue—Christmas themed—featured a specially designed cover printed in green ink.  Success was swift. The first issue sold 1000 copies “in a fortnight”. (1.) Within the first year, Sun & Shade quickly increased circulation to 4000 copies a month. With a public demand for reprinting earlier issues, this success lead to a rebranding, after which, beginning with the September, 1889 issue, the magazine was renamed Sun & Shade: An Artistic Periodical. The final issue was March, 1896, when financial issues to the parent company, spurred by the eventual May, 1896 bankruptcy of the N.Y. Photo-Gravure Company, forced its closure.

Sun & Shade would become the ultimate statement of the many skills and inquisitive mind of Englishman Ernest Edwards. (1836-1903) Essentially his own printed passion project, the magazine was fueled by his ongoing love of photography in the field (issues featured many plates by him over the years) and a deeply scientific mind which pushed the advancement of the state of photo-mechanical reproduction and fine printing.

The son of a clergyman from Bloomsbury in London, he initially made a name for himself taking photographic portraits of eminent people in his Baker Street gallery. (Charles Darwin sat for him several times) His love of the outdoors also bore fruit and he became an accomplished alpine photographer. But his real interest centered around photo-mechanical reproduction. In 1869, he took out a patent in England for his own rudimentary collotype process called heliotype. In the Fall of 1872, he moved across the pond along with his wife Charlotte, and became superintendent of Boston’s Heliotype Printing Company after selling the American rights to American publisher James Ripley Osgood. (1836–1892) Edwards ran the Heliotype Printing Co. there until the end of 1884. The following year the James R. Osgood & Co. went bankrupt, although not a result of the heliotype division.

Growing restless in Boston, he then moved to New York City, where he established a new firm in March, 1885: The Photo-Gravure Company, (subsequently renamed The New York Photo-Gravure Company) with offices in Manhattan and a leased printing factory in Brooklyn. In 1887, his company received perhaps the one commission it’s best known for today: the printing of  781 collotypes, which Edwards called photogelatine plates, making up the monumental publication:

Animal Locomotion. An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872-1885, with the landmark sequenced motion study photographs taken by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge. 

Restructured in 1891 as the New York Photogravure Co., Ernest Edwards continued to advance the state of photo-mechanical printing during his final decade, with Sun & Shade publishing some of the earliest examples of his own invention by 1894: plates printed in a three-color process called chrome-gelatine, a variation of his heliotype process.

Quality Rather than Quantity

Even though it survived less than eight years in print, describing Sun & Shade in Ernest Edward’s own words is perhaps the best posterity for this important photographic periodical with an artistic heart. One year after its’ debut, he wrote the following, published in The Photographic Times for August 2, 1889:

“A year ago we commenced the publication of our novel venture in journalism Sun and Shade, a Picture Periodical without letterpress, almost as an experiment, with a modest list of less than fifty subscribers. To-day we are printing an edition of 4,000 copies monthly. A sufficiently convincing proof of the wisdom of our hope that there was room for us.

“In our rapid growth the wish has been indicated unmistakably for the higher grade of pictures, and of the higher class–always for quality rather than quantity. Following rather than leading such a wish, we feel that we make no mistake in marking the future career of the magazine to be rather that of an artistic periodical than a photographic record of events.

*Our efforts shall be directed in the future to make Sun and Shade an artistic periodical which shall be not only pleasing but educational in its broadest sense, Some of our plans may be briefly referred to.

“We shall reproduce the leading pictures in the great collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Within the covers of Sun and Shade will be found from time to time, reproductions of the works of American artists. We shall especially endeavor to encourage the artistic side of direct photography in all its phases, And we shall supplement these special features with examples of sculpture, architecture, and industrial art. If in the future we receive as hearty a response to our efforts as we have received in the past, our task will be indeed pleasant and our road to success a royal one.” (p. 394)

1. Notice: Sun & Shade: October, 1888. The August and September issues did not appear.