Albert Sands Southworth

Albert Sands Southworth was born on March 12, 1811, in West Fairlee, Vermont, a birth date and place confirmed by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, though no source specifies the exact years of his enrollment, and he went on to work in the pharmacy trade in Cabotville, Massachusetts, now Chicopee.

In 1840, after seeing a demonstration of the new daguerreotype process, Southworth traveled to New York to study the technique directly with Samuel F. B. Morse. Within about a year he opened a daguerreotype studio in Boston with Morse's assistant, Joseph Pennell. In 1843, Josiah Johnson Hawes replaced Pennell as Southworth's partner, and the two formed Southworth and Hawes, a Boston studio that operated for roughly two decades. Sources give the closing date of the partnership as either 1861 or 1863, a discrepancy that has not been resolved here. During these years the studio produced elaborate portrait daguerreotypes of prominent New Englanders, including a well-known portrait of Daniel Webster now held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in 1858 made a set of mammoth-plate panoramic views of Boston taken from the State House, prints of which survive at Harvard and the Boston Athenaeum.

Southworth eventually stepped back from active photographic practice, and later biographical accounts describe him pursuing other interests, including lecturing and business ventures, in his later years. He died on March 3, 1894, in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Southworth and Hawes were recognized in their own time as leaders of the daguerreotype trade. In 1844 the firm received a diploma from the New York State Senate for the best specimens of the daguerreotype, recorded under the misspelled firm name "A. S. Southard & Co."

Modern institutional treatment has been consistently strong. The National Gallery of Art has included Southworth and Hawes daguerreotypes, notably "The Letter," in successive photography surveys spanning 2000 to 2015. The International Center of Photography organized the dedicated 2005 to 2006 traveling exhibition "Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes," which moved to George Eastman House and the Addison Gallery of American Art. The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery included the partnership's work in its 2024 to 2025 exhibition on presidential daguerreotypes and ambrotypes. Across this record, the recurring critical theme is technical and aesthetic ambition: Southworth and Hawes are consistently framed as having pushed the daguerreotype past documentary portraiture and toward something closer to fine art.

Because Southworth worked almost entirely within the partnership Southworth and Hawes, his work is nearly always catalogued and sold under the joint name, and the market for individual daguerreotypes is thin and largely institutional rather than driven by a deep, liquid resale trade. The clearest documented market event is the April 27, 1999, Sotheby's New York sale of a previously unknown hoard of 240 Southworth and Hawes daguerreotypes, which brought a combined total of about USD 3.3 million.

Records for individual lots are harder to pin down with full confidence. The best-documented single-lot result is the "Portrait of Albert Sands Southworth," attributed to Southworth and Hawes, which sold at Christie's for USD 141,800 in May 1980 and was described at the time as a record price for a photograph, though the exact sale day and city are not confirmed in the sources reviewed. Trade literature also references an earlier sale of the same portrait for USD 36,000, with the house and date unconfirmed. A separate Phillips auction lot titled "A Woman in Bonnet and Shawl, with Her Seated Son," attributed to Southworth and Hawes, is recorded as selling for USD 35,000 against an estimate of USD 10,000 to 15,000, though the exact sale date could not be confirmed. Aggregated auction data separately shows realized prices for individual Southworth photographic works reaching as high as USD 80,500, without a specific work, house, or date attached, a figure that does not reconcile cleanly with the higher Christie's result. Given these gaps, the USD 141,800 Christie's sale is the best-documented single-work high, and the USD 3.3 million Sotheby's group sale remains the largest overall market event.

Southworth's work almost never appears at auction under his name alone; it is cataloged, priced, and authenticated as the product of the Southworth and Hawes studio, so buyers should expect to research the partnership rather than a single-artist market. There is no catalogue raisonne, and attribution rests on studio and case marks, documented provenance, and connoisseurship rather than a formal certification process. The available price history is uneven: a single large institutional sale in 1999 accounts for the clearest benchmark, while individual-lot prices reported in trade sources range widely and are not always fully documented with a work, house, and date together. Given the age of the material, roughly a century and a half, and the small number of fully transparent sales, provenance research and institutional comparables matter more here than they would for a living artist with a deep, continuously priced market.