Marcus Aurelius Root

Marcus Aurelius Root was born on 15 August 1808 in Granville, Ohio (some reference sources confirm only the year 1808). He moved to Philadelphia in the early 1830s. He worked briefly as a portrait artist before teaching penmanship, and in 1835 he opened his own writing school in Philadelphia. Around 1843 he learned the daguerreotype process from Robert Cornelius, one of the earliest American practitioners of the medium, and turned that training into a full-time career.

On 20 June 1846, Root purchased the Chestnut Street studio of the photographer John Jabez Edwin Mayall in Philadelphia and built it into one of the city's leading portrait galleries, later known as Root's Gallery. He expanded aggressively, opening additional studios in Boston, St. Louis, Mobile, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., and partnering in New York with his brother Samuel Root, whose Root Brothers gallery operated there from 1849 to 1857. His sitters included well-known figures of the period such as Edgar Allan Poe, Jenny Lind, P.T. Barnum, and General Winfield Scott.

Root exhibited his daguerreotypes widely, including at Franklin Institute fairs in Philadelphia, where he won an 1849 award for "unrivalled excellence," and at exhibitions in Boston (1847), New York (1853), and London (1851 and 1854), winning a first prize at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Injured in a train accident in the 1850s, he used part of his recovery to write The Camera and the Pencil, or the Heliographic Art, an extensive history and defense of photography as an art form comparable to painting, published in the 1860s. He continued to show work as late as the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. A fall from a streetcar in 1885 left him largely secluded for his final years. He died in Philadelphia; the exact date is given as 12 April 1888 by several museum and historical sources and as 2 April 1888 by others, with both agreeing on his age (79) and place of death. He was buried at The Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia.

Root's standing rests less on later art criticism, of which little verbatim commentary survives in accessible sources, than on his own contemporary recognition and institutional legacy. His first prize at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and his Franklin Institute award of 1849 for "unrivalled excellence" were explicit acknowledgments of his technical standing among American daguerreotypists. His book, The Camera and the Pencil, is regarded by photo-historical institutions such as the Library Company of Philadelphia as an important early attempt to argue for photography's status as a fine art, placing it alongside painting rather than treating it as a mechanical novelty. His portraits of prominent nineteenth-century public figures, now held by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others, have kept his work in circulation in surveys of early American photography.

Root's auction record is USD 350,500, paid for the daguerreotype Anthony Pritchard, 1850, sold at Christie's New York on 8 October 2009 as part of The Miller-Plummer Collection of Photographs, more than ten times its high estimate. Outside that result, his daguerreotypes typically trade for far more modest sums, often in the low thousands of dollars, at specialist photography sales held by Christie's, Swann Galleries, and Heritage Auctions. Because each surviving daguerreotype is a unique plate rather than part of an edition, supply at auction is thin and irregular, and any single result, including the 2009 high, should be read as a data point tied to a specific sitter and plate rather than a market trend.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Root, and no estate or gallery manages his output; each daguerreotype is a unique, unrepeatable object whose authenticity depends on museum-grade provenance, period ephemera, and institutional documentation rather than a certificate program. The market is thin and infrequent, so prices vary enormously with the fame of the sitter and the condition and format of the plate, from low four figures for routine portraits to the 2009 high of USD 350,500 for an exceptional example. Collectors should treat gaps of years between comparable sales as normal for this material, and should weigh any single result, high or low, against the specific work rather than a broader pricing trend.