Photograph of First Lady of the United States Frances Folsom Cleveland. Albumen silver print.

Dimensions:

Image

12 x 9 cm (4 3/4 x 3 9/16")

Sheet

13.4 x 9.8 cm (5 1/4 x 3 7/8")

Mount

16.2 x 10.7 cm (6 3/8 x 4 3/16")

Restoration notes

Some signs of minor retouching back in the 19th century. I've compared it to other photos of her from the time, and think it's fairly minor, at least after using them to guide restoration. Probably mostly to help seperate her from the background. The dark part of the dress was very scratched up in places; I did my best to conserve detail, but some minor detail may have been lost.

The original photo had an arched top to the photographic plate; I've straightened this out as, for some reason, the National Portrait Gallery rarely includes the edges of the cabinet card, so there wasn't much point trying to keep the mount. My experience is that sufficiently widely-reproduced photographs of this era tend to exist in various crops and shapes - for example, File:Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Julia Margaret Cameron - Original.jpg vs. File:Alfred, Lord Tennyson MET DP295251.jpg, so this doesn't really affect artistic intent of the photographer, merely a whim of the specific mounting. See the upload history of File:Frances Folsom Cleveland, by Charles Milton Bell.png for the last restoration before this adjustment: As I didn't know how long it would take, I created a quick and dirty version of the corner filling-in for the JPEG. —Adam Cuerden