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Photographs of Dolley Madison? Sounds unlikely, like automobiles of George Washington. But the last decade of her long and colorful life-when she resided on Lafayette Square, in the house that eventually became the home of the Cosmos Club-coincided with the heyday of the daguerreotype, the earliest practical method of photography.
The 1850 census reports no fewer than 938 "daguerreotypists," mostly in New York, Boston and Washington, many eager to capture on their silvered copper plates the rich and famous of the day. Thus L. M. Edwards and Edward Anthony are said to have photographed all members of Congress. And Mathew B. Brady indefatigably sought to corral as many notables as he could. At each sitting, several pictures would be made; the sitters got some of them free and profit came from engravings or paintings made from the rest.
Certainly, Dolley Madison, the beloved grande dame of Washington society, was on Brady's list. The Library of Congress has an auction catalog offering a letter to her from the engraver Thomas Ritchie asking her to visit Brady's studio with a notation that she did so on July 4, 1848. That same day, she also attended the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the Washington Monument, for which she had helped to raise funds. Most likely the two daguerreotypes on these pages are a result of this visit though they did not come to public notice until one day in 1956, near Allentown, Pennsylvania. How they got there is a convoluted story.
After Dolley Madison's death in 1849, her niece Anna Payne, who had looked after her adopted daughter and companion, married Dr. James H. Causten, a man of means. Then Dolley's only child, her son Payne Todd, born of her first marriage and a drunkard who had impoverished his mother with his wasteful ways, put her things up at auction in 1852. Dr. Causten arranged to have most of them bought for himself and Anna. They passed to their daughter, Mary Kunkel, then to her son, John Baker Kunkel III, who settled with his wife Neva in a converted one-room schoolhouse near Allentown. Neva, by then a widow and a recluse, died in 1956, leaving the house a fearful, rat-infested mess. To clean it up and salvage anything of value, a court-appointed attorney hired a young law student, Charles Hafner. He remembers the details to this day:
"I'll never forget the musty smell," he says. Rags and old newspapers, two mattresses pock-marked with rodents' nests, a fifty-gallon drum full of rusting tin cans. But eventually he found a treasure: A trunk holding Dolley's things-elegant gowns, slippers, her characteristic turbans, letters and these two daguerreotypes. In all, more than 400 items were sold to a group of ladies from Greensboro, North Carolina, who valued them because Dolley was born in a log cabin near that city. It all went to the Greensboro Historical Museum, to be displayed there as a permanent memorial to Dolley Madison.
Were other daguerreotypes made of her? Definitely. The first may have been the one showing her in a group with President and Mrs. Polk, Secretary of State Buchanan and other cabinet members-nine figures in all-taken outdoors at the White House. This picture, owned by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, is now on view at the National Portrait Gallery in an exhibition titled "1846-Portrait of a Nation." The Gallery credits it to an unidentified photographer, but some experts believe it may have been made by G.P.A. Healey in 1845 or John Plumbe in 1846. It is said to be the one successful picture out of three attempts. In one, the President is obscured by shadow. In another, Dolley is blurred. For good daguerreotypes, one had to hold still for 30 seconds or so and she didn't.
There is circumstantial evidence of a Dolley daguerreotype that may be earlier still. In 1846, the engraver Thomas Doney published a 36-by-27-inch etching entitled "The United States Senate Chamber," containing more than a hundred figures. And there, up in the gallery, sits Dolley Madison, her head the size of a thumbnail. As a model for each figure, the engraver used a daguerreotype by Edward Anthony. Some were probably made in 1845 or possibly 1844 or 1843. Dolley's may have been one of those. Unfortunately, all but one of these pictures, the one of John Quincy Adams, were destroyed in a fire in Anthony's studio in New York in 1852.
In any case, a Dolley Madison daguerreotype is extremely rare and valuable. So says Clifford Krainik, a professional daguerreotype appraiser. Would he care to name a price for one in good condition? No. And so, in a sense, Dolley still is priceless.
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