Aged writing in the big photo album named the boy as Jacob Beck, her own father. She giggled while telling me about how the tintype almost didn't get made; She, Theresa Beck O'Shea, had a giggle like a cross between a bird's song and a witch in laughter that made anyone nearby want to giggle too. She said that young Jacob had to be "coat-wrangled" into the photographers studio, meaning that he was pulled in by the back of his coat collar. It seems that Jacob had been busy entangled in a fight at the time he should have been posing for a picture. He supposedly got the better of the boy who'd jumped him, but the boy had gotten in a few good punches too. The streets of the era were unpaved cobblestone and filthy... so now was Jacob.
Some studio photographs of 1885 or 1886 in Cincinnati Ohio were done by appointment prepaid, so he was getting his picture made that day no matter what! His daddy had broken up the fight and dragged Jacob down the city street to the photographer studio where his mother was waiting with a Sunday-suit in hand (a suit good enough to wear to church on a Sunday). She stripped him naked right there in the studio with a big picture window to give him a spit-bath, wiping off the blood and dirt with his fathers hankie and her own saliva. Though she was a lady enough she wasn't very happy with her sons rowdy behavior so she roughly dressed him up and shoved him in front of the camera, still combing his hair smooth. The photographer had to try to rush to get the photograph taken before Jacobs face began to bleed again from his wounds, but they were going to get what they got.
What they got turned out to be a nice little photograph. Though it's condition today shows its age some interesting details emerge when we look at the tintype through the computer. Let's examine a cropped enlargement. Clicking images in this blog entry will open them in a larger slide-show format. The second image is a crop of my scan. Though freckles aren't uncommon in my family there are some shadows that caught the attention of my artists eye as being too dark. I've drawn and painted portraits for years, often using photos, plus I've a talent with forensic photographic analysis so I feel comfortable stating that the marks aren't caused by damage to the photograph and certainly not just a patch of freckles.
In the enhanced image below I've added blue arrows to point to those suspicious shadow lines. Following the line of shadow down the bridge of the nose it can be seen that the shadow curves back up towards the center when it should continue downward. The light contours in such a way as to indicate that the shadow is impressed into the skin and not just on the surface of the photograph. The same sort of effect can be seen on the lower lip, indicating a curved split wound! Under the nostril on the shadow side there is a slight blooming effect like dark watercolor paint on wet paper. This could be caused by blood slowly seeping from the nose in combination with the lapse of time required for creating a tintype; a person posing had to hold still for several minutes. I've seen this type of motion blooming effect in antique photography before in both post-mortem photographs and chemical methods employed by some artists of the day.
*Please contact me for use of high resolution image files for your not-for-profit use. Images shown are Copyright owned by Tree Pruitt.
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