St. Louis: Mrs. J.H. Fitzgibbon, Photographer, [circa 1875].
Price: $675.00
Unbound. Measuring 4.5" x 6" image on a very slightly larger card with the back mark of Mrs. Fitzgibbon and her studio address on Olive Street in St. Louis. Slight wear, just about fine. Nicely composed image of an unidentified woman, possibly an actress, in a fancy, Little Bo Peep-esque outfit adorned with a large show hat.
Louisa M. Dennis of Buffalo, New York (later Mrs. J.H. Fitzgibbon) founded the St. Louis studio with her husband in 1869. She took over the studio on Olive Street in 1875 when her husband retired; he died in the sleeping car of a train in 1882. At about that time she sold the studio and in 1883 founded the long-running photographic journal *The St. Louis Photographer* (which took over from *The Practical Photographer* which she and her husband had founded upon his retirement) and which conducted business under that name until 1887, when it became *The St. Louis and Canadian Photographer*, which ran until 1910 or later. She later remarried and conducted business as Mrs. Fitzgibbon-Clark.
John H. Fitzgibbon, was a pioneering photographer. He took up photography in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1839 upon the announcement of the Daguerrian process. He later set up a studio in St. Louis, and then still later in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he was caught trying to run the blockade during the Civil War in order to flee the city and was sent to Cuba. After the War he was returned to New York City, where he met and married Louisa M. Dennis. At the time of his death a contemporary periodical note the he was "the oldest photographer in the country, save one" (at age 65!).
A nice image by an entrepreneurial woman who was both a pioneering western woman photographer and a journalist-publisher. Her work is represented in the Julia Driver Collection of Women in Photography at Yale.
Item #394553
