Carte de Visite Portrait of an Indian Man, Sold for the Benefit of Foreign Mission Work.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: n.d., likely 1870s–1880s. Carte de visite measuring approximately 2 ½ x 4 inches. Albumen portrait of an Indian man wearing a turban and white garment, mounted on photographer’s card. Printed verso headed “India Missionary Photographs,” advertising copies of “this and other India photographs, printed by first-class artists in Philadelphia, from negatives taken in India,” sold for the benefit of foreign mission work. Addressed in print to Rev. A. D. Rowe, York, Pennsylvania, or Miss Alice Geiger, Secretary Woman’s Missionary Society, Springfield, Ohio. Light wear and toning; very good. Item #List3871
A carte de visite portrait from a series of India missionary photographs, printed in Philadelphia from negatives taken in India and sold to raise money for foreign mission work. The verso offers the photographs in card and cabinet sizes, with prices for single copies, small groups, and lots of one hundred, suggesting that the images were intended for circulation among church members, missionary supporters, and women’s missionary societies. American missions in South Asia were less politically dominant than British missionary work there, but were active throughout the nineteenth century, especially through Congregational, Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and women’s missionary societies. By the later nineteenth century, American mission networks in India supported schools, medical work, printing, itinerant preaching, and fundraising efforts at home, of which photographic cards like this were one small part. A strong nineteenth-century missionary CDV, especially for its printed verso documenting the reproduction, pricing, and circulation of South Asian photographs through American foreign mission networks, this being the first example we have encountered with a South Asian subject.
Price: $400.00