This rare and unique album by artist and photographer Irene Elizabeth Jerome Hood (1858-1945) is believed to date to ca. 1910 and features 26 cyanotype process artistic Colorado Winter views ca. 1900-1905. Known locations for some of these photographs are Colorado Springs, South Cheyenne Cañon, Congress Park in Denver, Rollins Pass, Buffalo Park and Buffalo Creek, the latter being the location for a seven-bedroom summer home known as “La Hacienda” built for the photographer’s brother John L. Jerome (1854-1903) in 1902, the architect being Frederick Sterner. A lawyer by training who was a third cousin of Sir Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie Jerome, he was a former City Attorney for Denver who went on to become an important early Colorado industrialist, who helped found the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1893.

Two of the photographs in this album are also contained (with alternate titles) in the 1908 Irene Hood photograph album held at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. See:  Untitled & “Buffalo Park in December Holidays”, the last two cyanotypes in the pagination of this album.

Album Details
12 mo, notebook sized volume 15.5 x 13.5 cm with silk ties featuring string-bound (perished) laid-paper leaves with the Berkshire Text watermark. Paper manufactured by the American Writing Paper Company of Holyoke, MA. An early reference for this watermark comes from the March, 1908 issue of The Printing Art Sample Book, an imprint of The University Press of Cambridge, MA. Founded in 1899, by 1910, The American Writing Paper Company promoted itself in the pages of Putnam’s Magazine as the “Largest Manufacturers of Commercial Paper in the World”, with 29 mills nationwide.

Irene Elizabeth Jerome Hood (1858-1945) was an artist and photographer. She was born in Ellicottville, New York, to Charles Jerome (1815-1873) and Elizabeth Reed Jerome (1825-1858). In 1887, she married attorney Thomas H. Hood (1856-1946). She died in Colorado. (1.)

Provenance: Purchased for this archive in August, 2022 from dealer based in Lancaster, NH who had purchased it from a New Hampshire estate several years previously. In addition to several loose cyanotypes from Colorado believed to be by Hood, (also held by this archive) various items from this estate included a saddle, spurs, Stetson hat, Navajo rug and assorted jewelry.

1. courtesy ArchiveGrid: from Yale University