A Daguerrian Self-Portrait

Attributed to S.N. Carvalho (1815-1897)
[Self- portrait]
Half-plate daguerreotype, ca. 1850
Prints & Photographs Division
Purchased from Mrs. Jena McNutt, 1974
LC-USZ62-112299 (127.3)
[digital ID# cph.3c12299]

Solomon Nunes Carvalho was born in 1815 in Charleston, South Carolina, into a Jewish family of Spanish-Portuguese descent. Carvalho worked as both a portrait and landscape painter and a photographer. During the winter of 1853-1854, Carvalho was a member of John C. Frémont's arduous expedition through the territories of Kansas, Colorado, and Utah in search of a direct route to the Pacific Ocean. The daguerreotypes that Carvalho took on this expedition no longer exist.