The expression “First Lady of the United States” appeared thanks to Dolley Madison, who helped her husband, the fourth US President James Madison, establish political connections and made the White House the center of Washington society.
The earliest known photograph of the First Lady of the United States dates back to around 1846. The daguerreotype of Dolley Madison was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, D.C., at a Sotheby's auction for $456,000.
The Art Newspaper writes about this.
The image joins the gallery's collection of other early photographic portraits, including what is believed to be the earliest photograph of a U.S. president, the 1843 daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams by Philip Haas, which was acquired by the museum in 2017. A daguerreotype by artist and entrepreneur John Plumb Jr. depicts First Lady Dolley Madison in her mid-seventies.
Plumb was an English immigrant who came to America in 1821 and took up photography professionally 20 years later. He opened photography studios in more than ten cities, but a few years later, in 1847, he sold his business. Plumb is also the author of the earliest surviving image of the US Capitol.
The Smithsonian Institution Gallery bought the photo of Dolley Madison at the June 28 book and manuscript auction for more than six times the lot's starting price of $70,000. The whopping $456,000 purchase price for the unique photo was provided jointly by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch and the Joseph Memorial Fund L. and Emily K. Gidwitz and private donors.
The Sotheby's auction catalog describes this lot as “one of the extremely few surviving photographs of the woman who for two centuries defined what it meant to be the First Lady of the United States of America.”
“This artifact will provide the Smithsonian with another opportunity to tell a more accurate story of America and shed light on the important role that women like Dolley Madison played in the progress of the country,” Lonnie Branch said after the purchase.
Raised Quaker in Philadelphia, Dolly Payne Todd Madison, according to many historians and experts, invented the role of First Lady. Her openness of character, intelligence, and skill as a hostess helped her husband create strategic connections in politics and make the White House the center of Washington society.
Her Wednesday evening receptions became legendary during her tenure husband as president. It is known that the US House of Representatives gave her a seat of honor when she expressed a desire to attend meetings in the Capitol. At Dolley Madison's funeral in 1849, the 12th President of the United States, Zachary Taylor, described her as “the first lady of the country for half a century,” marking the first use of the phrase “first lady.”
The daguerreotype was the first photographic technology to be put into practical use, invented by the French artist Louis Daguerre in 1839
The process involves polishing a sheet of silver-plated copper and treating it with light-sensitive vapors before exposing it to the camera, and then extracting the latent image using mercury vapors and chemical treatments. It was the most popular and accessible form of photographic image creation, used for two decades and replaced in the second half of the 19th century by cheaper and more convenient processes.
The National Portrait Gallery in Washington acquires the earliest known photograph of a US First Lady, an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolley Madisonhttps://t.co/lfErpogc7x pic. twitter.com/9TZQH2XHsn
— The Art Newspaper (@TheArtNewspaper) July 4, 2024
Recall that the first illustration of the book about Harry Potter was sold at auction for a fabulous sum. Illustrator Thomas Taylor was only 23 years old when he first visualized the protagonist of JK Rowling's iconic books in 1997.
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