Catharine Weed Barnes

Photographers, Portrait: Woman, Women of Mark

Dimensions

Image Dimensions: 15.2 x 10.8 cm | published August 29, 1890 | issue No. 467
Support Dimensions: detail: 28.7 x 20.5 cm

Editorial comment on this plate:

We take especial pleasure in presenting our readers this week with a portrait of the eminent lady amateur, Miss Catharine Weed Barnes. The likeness is an excellent one, being made by Sterry, of Albany—a skillful professional friend of Miss Barnes. Undoubtedly, however, much credit -for the success of the picture is due also to the subject of the picture as “it requires a certain amount of histrionic ability to sit for an ordinary portrait,” as Miss Barnes herself says in her recent paper on “Illustrating Poems by Photography,” and Miss Barnes was a gifted amateur actress and painter before she became an amateur photographer.
Miss Barnes has been an amateur photographer since 1886, her special preference being for interior work and portraits. She had fitted up for herself, on the top floor of her handsome residence in Albany, a studio for photographic portraiture. Here she made many successful pictures, by means of photography, from living subjects, a few of which the public have been permitted to see. Our readers will remember the “Five O’Clock Tea,” taken by side-light in an ordinary room, presented in The Photographic Times of January 24th, and “An Interior,” which made its appearance in the March 21st issue of the same year. In the June number of the American Amateur Photographer of which Miss Barnes is a joint editor with the Rev.’ W. H. Burbank and Mr. F. C. Beach—having sole charge of the ladies’ department—her picture entitled “Greek Girl” was reproduced in artotype, and excited a good deal of favorable comment.
Quite recently Miss Barnes completed a new photographic studio in a separate building, constructed especially for the purpose. This is supplied with backgrounds by Seavey, the best of apparatus (two portrait cameras), and a well assorted “battery”of lenses, four for the studio and nine for other work. She has nine cameras in all. In this improved studio, Miss Barnes expects to make great advances in her portrait work. Here it was that her own portrait was made which adorns this number of The Photo-Graphic Times.
Miss Barnes is an active member of the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York, and an honorary member of the Chicago Camera Club. She has contributed several papers to the literature of photography through the former organization, which have been widely read. In 1888 she received a diploma for the excellence of her work exhibited at Boston. She entered the Enoch Arden prize competition at the late Washington Convention of the P. A. of A. with three pictures, which were judged entitled to second place by an eminent art critic who examined all the photographs exhibited. “It is my great desire,” writes Miss Barnes, “to encourage other women to do really good, faithful work, and claim no privilege which they have not earned.”
It may not be out of place to state that Miss Barnes is a granddaughter of New York’s noted statesman, Thurlow Weed, and that her friends recognize many traits in her character which distinguished her well known grandfather.


Edward Bierstadt’s Artotype Printing Works, first established in 1870, were located at 58 & 60 Reade Street, New York City. The artotype was a “close relative” of the collotype process, and therefore we categorize it under the Collotype heading in Atelier category.


engraved below facsimile autograph:

Artotype
E. Bierstadt, N.Y.