James Notman (Glasgow, 1849-1932, Nova Scotia)
Sarah Orne Jewett, 1870
Gelatin silver print, 35.3 x 26.7 cm (13 7/8 x 10 1/2 in.)
This is a sepia toned photograph of a young light-skinned woman facing in three-quarter profile to the viewer’s left. Her head and neck are visible and fade out to the white background just before her shoulders. She is upright with a neutral expression. Her thick, slightly wavy, mid-toned hair is styled away from her face, and piled up on the crown of her head. Her clothing is of a plain dark material, with a high rough-edged collar close to her neck and covering her shoulders. There is a short decorative knot at her throat over two flat, circular buttons that seem to continue down the front of her bodice.
Blue Room
Commentary
Author Sarah Orne Jewett earned a reputation for her realist portrayal of life in New England through novels and interconnected short stories such as The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Jewett shared a home in Beacon Hill with the author Annie Adams Fields, widow of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s publisher James Thomas Fields. Together they hosted some of the brightest minds in the American literary scene, including Willa Cather, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Mark Twain.