Jeremiah Gurney (October 17, 1812 – April 21, 1895), was an American daguerreotype photographer operating in New York.

Biography

Gurney worked in the jewelry trade in

Saratoga, New York } Saratoga is a town in Saratoga County, New York, United States. The population was 5,141 at the 2000 census. It is also the commonly used, but not official, name for the neighboring and much more populous city, Saratoga Springs. The major vill ...

, but learned about the daguerreotype from

Samuel Morse Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was an American inventor and painter. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph ...

, took up photography, and after moving to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

, began selling photographs alongside jewelry from his shop.http://historiccamera.com/cgi-bin/librarium2/pm.cgi?action=app_display&app=datasheet&app_id=243 Different sources call him either the owner of the first photographic gallery in America and second practitioner after Morse, or merely one of the earliest practitioners in New York City and "one of the first" photographic galleries on Broadway. Metropolitan Museum of Art
/ref> The Metropolitan Museum of Art credits his success to him "producing the finest daguerreotypes in Gotham", and praises his "tonally delicate, startlingly three-dimensional portraits" such as his "Two Girls in Identical Dresses". A ''

Scientific American ''Scientific American'', informally abbreviated ''SciAm'' or sometimes ''SA'', is an American popular science magazine. Many famous scientists, including Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, have contributed articles to it. In print since 1845, it ...

'' article, reviewing an 1853 photographic display at the

Crystal Palace Crystal Palace may refer to: Places Canada * Crystal Palace Complex (Dieppe), a former amusement park now a shopping complex in Dieppe, New Brunswick * Crystal Palace Barracks, London, Ontario * Crystal Palace (Montreal), an exhibition building ...

in London praises American photographers and calls out the "exquisite taste and skill displayed in the pictures of Gurney and others" at the exposition. Photographer of the American Civil War Mathew B. Brady was a journeyman in the firm that made the cases for Gurney's shop, and was inspired to enter photography by Gurney's success, starting up a rival firm. One of the things Gurney is best known for is having taken the only known photograph of Abraham Lincoln in death.americancivilwarstory.com
nbsp; (see appropriate caption); Retrieved October 19, 2015

Gallery

File:Harvard Theatre Collection - Nelse Seymour TCS 1.946.jpg, Actor Nelse Seymour File:Harvard Theatre Collection - D. E. Bandmann TCS 1.1052.jpg, Actor Daniel E. Bandmann File:White swans, by J. Gurney & Son.jpg, Swans in

Central Park Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the fifth-largest park in the city, covering . It is the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated ...

, New York File:J._Gurney_%26_Son_-_J.E.B._Stuart.jpg, CSA General J. E. B. Stuart

References

Bibliography

* Peterson, Christian A. ''Chaining the Sun: Portraits by Jeremiah Gurney'', , University of Minnesota Press (1999)

External links

The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe Memoirs of Jeremiah GurneyPrivate Gurney Collection at Alphonse Gallery
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gurney, Jeremiah Pioneers of photography American portrait photographers 1812 births 1895 deaths Photographers from New York City People from Little Falls, New York 19th-century American photographers