Laura Page Butcher photograph album, 1897-1903
2 volumes
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.