Editorial comment for this plate:

BISHOP BROOKS.

We take great pleasure in presenting our readers this week with so excellent a portrait of Bishop Phillips Brooks as adorns this number of THE PHOTOGRAPHIC TIMES. The negative was made by Mr. Gutekunst, a few years ago and has never been reproduced for publication. It is considered a better likeness than more recent portraits, and will be especially appreciated by the extensive circle of admirers of Phillips Brooks from the fact that it is really a new portrait of him. We publish the portrait with the Bishop’s knowledge and consent. “I am quite willing that you should use the photograph as you desire,” he promptly writes in response to our request, and our readers are thereby permitted to see another portrait of an eminent American by an artist who may always be studied with profit.

Bishop Brooks is too widely known and admired to require any word of introduction. Such a word would be almost a presumption. He is undoubtedly the most prominent preacher America has produced since Henry Ward Beecher. But what is greater than prominence is the fact that wherever he is known he is respected; by whomsoever admired, beloved.

Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835 – January 23, 1893) was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, long the rector of Boston’s Trinity Church and briefly Bishop of Massachusetts. One of the most popular preachers of the Gilded Age, he worked to make the Christian Church more relevant to contemporaries. Among his other accomplishments, he wrote the lyrics of the Christmas hymn “O Little Town of Bethlehem”.—Wikipedia (2026)