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The Laura Page Butcher photograph album contains photographs, newspaper clippings, and ephemera pertaining to Butcher's leisure activities and travels in the United States, Europe, and North Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Laura Page Butcher photograph album (27cm x 37cm) contains around 350 photographs with newspaper clippings and printed ephemera pertaining to Butcher's career as an artist, her leisure activities, and her travels in the United States, Europe, and North Africa from June 1897-June 1903. The photographs include single prints, cyanotypes, and individual prints assembled into panoramas. Most of the photographs are original snapshots, with professionally portraits and some commercially produced views included. The album has been reconstructed and re-bound; the original cover, with the title "Photographs" printed on the front, is housed separately. Some quotations and captions, usually providing a location and date, are written directly onto the album pages or onto photographs.

Most photographs are informal and studio portraits of men and women, pictures of women enjoying leisure activities, exterior and interior shots of mansions and hotels, and views of natural and urban scenery from Butcher's vacations and international travels. Portrait subjects include Laura Page Butcher, her traveling companions, artist friends, and a large formal wedding party. Groups of women are shown painting, riding horses, driving carriages, swimming in an indoor pool, and golfing. Butcher's travel photographs from Paris, France; Funchal, Madeira; Granada, Spain; Algiers, Algeria; and Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt, focus on urban scenery, landmarks, and local populations. Included are the Eiffel Tower, Alhambra, the Great Sphinx, and Giza pyramids. Timeless examples of tourists photographed at Giza in Egypt appear. Photographs of Paris include the Exposition Universelle of 1900. Butcher's return to the United States on the steamship St. Louis is documented with several dramatic seascapes. Many images of leisure activities taken along the eastern shore of the United States. Other images of note show the parade for the dedication of the Fairmount Park, Philadelphia Washington Monument in 1897, an American soldier in uniform taken in Manila, Philippines; one colored photomechanical print shows a group of people in Algiers surrounding a ritual activity or performance. Also of note is a panorama of a bull fight given by Spanish prisoners of war held on Seavy's Island, Maine, with William Jean Howells identified as a spectator.

The album also includes newspaper clippings and ephemera items. The clippings are primarily society page items about the activities of Laura Page Butcher and her siblings, such as the family's vacations in West Virginia, Laura's winter in France, and Alice Tyson Butcher's wedding. Quotations often pertain to art, among other subjects.

Of particular note are the photographs, notes, and ephemera related to Butcher's art career. Images appear of young women in artists' smocks with palettes, in life classes, sketching outdoors at the Shinnecock School, in a Paris atelier and other unidentified studios. An interest in James McNeill Whistler is revealed by the inscriptions quoting Whistler's "Ten O'Clock" lecture, a copy of the butterfly monograph of Whistler, and comment on Whistler's work transcribed from the periodical "The Trimmed Lamp" appearing on pages five and ten, and Whistler antidotes in clippings elsewhere in the album. Material related to Butcher's participation in the exposition of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts at the Grand Palais, including her letter of admission, is on page 19.

This album contains photographs taken by the Philadelphia photographic business of Robert Newell & Son in the late 1860s. Images include views of Philadelphia buildings and street scenes; views of Cape May, New Jersey; a few scenes in New York City, studies of tableware; portraits; collages; groups of fire-fighters and equipment; and reproductions of paintings and engravings.

This album (35cm x 27cm, 50 pages) contains 163 images, including architectural views, landscape photographs, portraits, reproductions of paintings and engravings, objects, and commercial advertising displays. The volume, which contains an image of Robert Newell's photographic wagon, an advertising montage made up from images in the album, and an advertising montage for "R. Newell & Son, Artistic Business & Landscape Photographers," may have been used as a sample book for the Newell firm. Many of the photographs are dated in the 1860s, prior to the 1872 date that Robert's son Henry joined the business. The album was in an unbound and fragmented condition when acquired, later reassembled in Mylar sleeves with modern binding by the Clements. The page sequence is based on evidence of the original binding and the contents. Some images appear to have been removed from the album, including a portrait of Boston Corbett, the killer of John Wilkes Booth. Captions in pencil appear to have been added later, possibly by Robert or Henry Newell.

Many photographs are views of individual buildings and streets in Philadelphia including Independence Hall; the Philadelphia Mint; Girard Bank; the Arch Street Theater; plus other commercial buildings, churches, homes, and newly constructed residential areas. Items of interest include photographs of the procession of a visiting Japanese diplomatic delegation; the aftermath of a boiler explosion on Samson Street; canals and locks along the Schuylkill River; a high bridge under construction over a canal; an early oil well; images of commercial products and goods such as silver, cutlery, guns, and a display by importers Field, Langstroth & Co.

Photographic portraits include pictures of unidentified individuals, some likely actors and actresses; a reproduction of a painting of "Bishop Potter;" and a small full-length portrait of the bare-knuckle boxer John C. Heenan. The album also contains photographic montages of United States presidents and Civil War generals; a reproduction of a patriotic painting of George Washington welcoming Abraham Lincoln to heaven; a photograph of "Liberty Indignant" -- a patriotic tableau made up of a woman dressed as Liberty, with a portrait of Lincoln, a flag, and eagle.

The album contains reproductions of unidentified paintings, genre scenes, and engraved portraits. A view of the Fulton Bridge over Broadway may be the only New York City view in the album.

Of particular note are a picture of Robert Newell's photographic cart at Cape May, New Jersey, with a stereo camera visible; several images of vacationers, bathers, cottages, hotels, the railroad office, and an ice cream parlor at Cape May; a rare view of the interior of the Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon in Philadelphia; a view of a crowd at the "rebel wigwam," the temporary convention hall built opposite Girard College for the first national political convention after the Civil War; and several pages of small images of Philadelphia fire-fighting companies and their equipment.

Of importance in the history of photography is a print from 1865 of what is believed to be the first experiment with indoor flash photography by J. C. Browne, showing a family group in a living room (Taft, pg.202).