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Victor Prevost Photograph Collection

Call Number

PR 56

Date

1853-ca. 1943, inclusive

Creator

Extent

7.42 Linear feet (5 boxes, plus one flat file folder)

Language of Materials

The documents in the collection are in English.

Abstract

The collection consists of 44 calotype negatives and several generations of contact prints. The artfully composed scenes are thought to be among the earliest surviving paper photographic views of New York City. They are prized as fine examples of the calotype process, which was rarely used in the United States. The images portray 23 sites from Battery Place and lower Broadway's commercial buildings to the Crystal Palace exhibition, scattered buildings in upper Manhattan, and churches around East 28th Street, near Prevost's home.

The Victor Prevost Photograph Collection is digitized and available in the Shelby White and Leon Levy Digital Library.

Biographical Note

Victor Prevost was born in La Rochelle, France in 1802. As a young man, he studied art with Paul Delaroche in Paris. Around 1847, Prevost traveled to California, where he made paintings and drawings of the landscape, creating some of the earliest surviving images of pre-gold rush San Francisco. He moved to New York City in 1850 and continued to make his living as an artist. During this period he began to experiment with photography.

On a visit to France in 1853, Prevost learned Gustave Le Gray's calotype process. Based on the calotype process developed by William Henry Fox Talbot, Le Gray's method employed sensitized waxed paper to make photographic negatives. In France, Prevost produced landscape photos of the Forest of Compiegne, views of the castle of Pierrefonds, and architectural studies of the town of Soissons that demonstrate his mastery of the technique as well as his fine artistic sensibility.

When he returned to New York, Prevost opened a photography studio at 627 Broadway, between Houston and Bleecker Streets, with P. C. Duchochois as his partner. He was one of the few photographers in the United States producing calotypes commercially. Prevost entered his images at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853 and was awarded several honorable mentions but lost the prize to John Adams Whipple, who made images using what he called the cystalotype process, collodion on glass. In 1854, several of Prevost's images appeared in Photographic and Fine Art Journal. The accompanying article praised the images and hinted that Prevost had plans to publish them as a book documenting New York City. Although the book never materialized, his methodical recording of particular areas of the city as well as his signing and numbering of his negatives suggest that he did have the intention to produce one.

Unfortunately, Prevost was unable to compete with the successful studios that dominated New York's photographic market during this era and closed his business in 1855. He took a job working for another calotype studio but held it only briefly. In 1857, he turned to teaching art and physics at a private institute for girls, operated by his wife's aunt. He did, however, continue to photograph, as evidenced by surviving images from the 1860s and 70s. Prevost went on to become the principal at Fort Washington French Institute and later at the Tivoli-on-Hudson Institute where he remained until his death in 1881.

Arrangement

The negatives and prints are arranged in alphabetical order (roughly by proper noun) by their titles.

Scope and Content Note

Victor Prevost's calotype negatives survive as rare examples of early paper photographs of New York City. The New-York Historical Society's Prevost Collection includes forty-four original negatives as well as prints made from these negatives, mostly during the twentieth century. The collection has been arranged in three series: Series I. Calotype Negatives; Series II. Contact Prints from Calotype Negatives; and Series III. Prints of Prevost Images in Other Collections.

Series I. Calotype Negatives consists of the original waxed paper negatives made by Victor Prevost. The negatives were found in the attic of a house of one of Prevost's students in 1898. They were given to a local photographer who in turn passed them on to William I. Scandlin (ca. 1855-1927). Scandlin, an editor for photographic journals who was also a photographer, realized the significance of the images. He wrote and lectured on Prevost at the turn of the twentieth century, including one lantern slide talk he gave at the New-York Historical Society in June 1903.. Scandlin's research provides us with much of what we know about Prevost as well as the identification and dates of many of the individual images. Scandlin's captions for the images, in alphabetical order (roughly by proper noun), serve as the basis for the numbering of the negatives (now known as Prevost #1 through #44). Sometime between 1901 and 1906, Samuel V. Hoffmann (1866-1942) bought some of Prevost's negatives (and perhaps Scandlin's prints of those) from Scandlin. In 1906, Hoffman donated the negatives to the New-York Historical Society.

The waxed paper negatives were made using a variation of the calotype process developed by Gustave Le Gray. Several of the negatives were titled, signed and dated by Prevost. The images document significant buildings and scenes in New York City and its environs. Twenty-three views of sites in downtown Manhattan record the area around Battery Place and many of the commercial buildings on Lower Broadway. These images provide a glimpse of the period's architecture and include many legible signs and bills identifying local businesses and other activities. Prevost also photographed the area near his home on East 28th Street, including several views taken from the windows of his house. Scattered buildings in upper Manhattan are documented, including the house of Dr. Valentine Mott on 94th Street and Bloomingdale Road. The collection also contains photographs of the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition (1853-54), primarily of sculpture and machinery on display.

Series II. Contact Prints from Calotype Negatives contains photographs made from Prevost's original negatives. This series is comprised of prints that were once in four separate sets that came from different sources. None of the four sets were complete in having images from every one of the negatives in the collection. In addition, there were duplicates of certain images within each set. The prints are now combined in one set, which is arranged by Prevost image number as assigned by Series I. However, the provenance for any single print can be readily identified based on an accession date or other markings on its verso. The prints are undated, but those given by Samuel Hoffman's family were made prior to his 1906 donation of the negatives to N-YHS; prints made by N-YHS were obviously made after this date.

The first set of sixty archival photographs was donated to the Society on February 2, 1943, by Eugene Hoffman, the son of Samuel V. Hoffman; it is comprised of gelatin silver contact prints probably made around the turn of the twentieth century. It remains unclear whether Hoffmann purchased these prints from Scandlin along with the negatives, or if he had them made after the Prevost negatives were in his possession.

Another set of twelve prints came to the Society on April 21, 1943, as the bequest of Samuel V. Hoffman. These are also gelatin silver prints but are printed on a lightweight paper and are generally of poorer quality than the prints donated by Eugene Hoffman two months earlier.

A third set is thirty-one gelatin silver contact prints that appear to have been made by the New-York Historical Society from the Prevost negatives sometime between their arrival in 1906 and 1917. They were possibly made for the purposes of publication as several of the images were reproduced in the Society's 1917 and 1918 annual reports. Many of these photographs have printed text captions, cut from the pages of the annual reports, pasted on their versos.

The final set of forty-one gelatin silver prints are all identified with numbers on small brown labels affixed to the top left corner of each the prints' versos. These contact prints were made by the Society around 1943, and a set of 8 x 10-inch copy negatives was made from these prints.

Two prints, mounted on board, have been filed separately in an oversized flat file folder. The photographs, Prevost image numbers 25 & 26, are both of Madison Square.

Series III. Prints of Prevost Images in Other Collections consists of prints made from Victor Prevost negatives that are not in the N-YHS collection. These are identified as prints from an original negative in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and are images of Root's Daguerrean Gallery on Broadway in New York; they appear to be made from the same negative with a slight variation in cropping. These prints may have been part of the original 1906 donation from Samuel Hoffman, as accession records refer to "three photographs" that were donated at the same time as the negatives.

This series also contains an exterior shot of the New York Crystal Palace and Latting Observatory, attributed to Victor Prevost or his partner P.C. Duchochois. It is not clear whether a negative of this image is extant. This print was the gift of Charles Scwartz, 2003.

Access Restrictions

Materials in this collection may be stored offsite. For more information on making arrangements to consult them, please visit www.nyhistory.org/library/visit.

Use Restrictions

Taking images of documents from the library collections for reference purposes by using hand-held cameras and in accordance with the library's photography guidelines is encouraged. As an alternative, patrons may request up to 20 images per day from staff.

Application to use images from this collection for publication should be made in writing to: Department of Rights and Reproductions, The New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024-5194, rightsandrepro@nyhistory.org. Phone: (212) 873-3400 ext. 282.

Copyrights and other proprietary rights may subsist in individuals and entities other than the New-York Historical Society, in which case the patron is responsible for securing permission from those parties. For fuller information about rights and reproductions from N-YHS visit: https://www.nyhistory.org/about/rights-reproductions

Preferred Citation

This collection should be cited as This collection should be cited as: Victor Prevost Photograph Collection, PR 056, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections; The New-York Historical Society.

Location of Materials

Materials in this collection may be stored offsite. For more information on making arrangements to consult them, please visit www.nyhistory.org/library/visit.

Provenance

Forty-four paper negatives and three photographs were given by Samuel V. Hoffman in 1906; sixty photographs were given on February 2, 1943 by Eugene Hoffman; twelve photographs were given on April 21, 1943 as the Bequest of Samuel V. Hoffman; seventy-two prints were made by the New-York Historical Society. Additional prints from the above sources were discovered and added to the collection in December 2007.

Related Material

The following institutions hold other work of Victor Prevost: Avery Architectural and Fine Art Library, Corcoran Gallery of Art, George Eastman House, Hallmark Photographic Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, National Museum of American History, and New York Public Library.

Existence and Location of Copies

Digital copies are available in the Shelby White and Leon Levy Digital Library.

General note

Sources

Missing Title

  1. Duncan, R. Bruce. "I, Victor Prevost" Graphic Antiquarian 4 (Oct. 1976): 5-11.
  2. Jammes & Janis. Art of the French Calotype, 1983.
  3. Scandlin, W. I. " Victor Prevost. Photographer, Artists, Chemist, a New Chapter in the early History of Photography in this Country." Photo Era (Oct. 1901): 126-131.

Collection processed by

Emily Wolff, Sandra Markham, and Jenny Gotwals

About this Guide

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2023-08-21 15:49:33 -0400.
Language: Description is in English.

Edition of this Guide

This version was derived from prevost.xml

Repository

New-York Historical Society
New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024