[Harvard University Class Album, Class of 1872]

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Warren Photo, 1872. 2 vols. Folio, half brown leather with brown cloth over boards, beveled edges, raised bands, gilt rules and volume numbers at spine, "Peter Hulme Harvard '72" stamped in gold on upper cover of each volume. Vol. 1: 3 pp. index (partially printed and partially manuscript), 124 photos on 124 leaves; Vol. 2: 2 pp. index (partially printed and partially manuscript), 81 photos on 81 leaves. All photos albumen prints, image sizes ranging from approx. 4.5" x 3.5" (the portraits) to 5.75" x 7.75" (outdoor scenes). All subjects are identified in the index pages.

A marvelous two-volume Harvard University class album comprising 205 original photographs, picturing the administration, faculty, students, and campus scenes, including images of a number of notable figures.

Vol. 1 features photographs of 124 members of the class; Vol. II comprises photographs of the administration, including the president, the ex-president, the chaplain, and the dean, as well as faculty. Among the latter are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), the American poet and educator from Portland, Maine; Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935), the renowned jurist who later served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1902-1932); eminent naturalist Louis Agassiz; poet James Russell Lowell; and professor of Greek and remarkable character Evangelinus A. Sophocles, described in two period obituaries laid in as "a picturesque figure...a veritable type of the antique" and "one of the most distinguished members of the Harvard Faculty." Also included in Vol. II are several group portraits and some 41 views of the campus and its vicinity, including the campus quad; several winter campus scenes; various halls and dormitories; churches and chapels; the interior of the library; a boat house; Harvard Square; a museum; an observatory; a gymnasium; etc. In one photo labeled "Goodies," a group of housekeepers is pictured outside a campus building with their cleaning equipment.

Photographer George Kendall Warren (1832-1884) began his prolific career in Lowell, Mass. in 1851 where he opened one of the city's first daguerreotype studios. By 1858-when the portrait business in Lowell was in decline-Warren began traveling to various Ivy League and elite colleges where he made portraits of the graduating class as well as faculty, landscapes and architectural views of the campuses to fill senior class albums. In 1861 he began taking class photographs for Harvard, and in 1863 he opened a studio in Cambridge and continued what became a long project of capturing campus life and the architecture at Harvard and around Harvard Square. As a result of the success he found, Warren increasingly specialized in class photos for colleges, which came to define his career. In addition to his work for Harvard, he took photos for Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Williams, and Brown. Warren also made many scenic cartes-de-visites of historic sites in the Cambridge, Concord and Boston areas. In 1870, he moved to Boston where he opened a second studio and soon thereafter a third in Cambridgeport. His carte-de-visite portraits of New England notables, including Louisa May Alcott, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, sold widely. Warren also photographed stage and concert celebrities who performed in Boston, including Charlotte Cushman, Mary Anderson and Ole Bull.

While albumen prints were introduced in the 1850s, Warren continued using the salted paper print process for the Harvard class albums into the mid-1860s. Forging his own particular aesthetic using this early photographic technique, his images for senior class albums reveal a rich balance of subtle tones and minute details.

REFERENCES: Panzer, Mary, "The George Kendall Warren photography collection," National Museum of American History (2015) at tandfonline[dot]com; George Kendall Warren at getty[dot]edu; George Kendall Warren (1834-1884) at projects.[dot]iq.harvard[dot]edu.

CONDITION: Very good, tonality of photographs generally strong, a few images rubbed.