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Fit to be Carved

Pick a pumpkin and start sculpting! It's Bring Your Jack-o'-Lantern to Work Day!

Today's daguerreotype—an early photograph made on a sheet of silver-plated copper—features a pumpkin ready for carving!

Still lifes were not often composed for the daguerreotype camera, which usually focused on the more pragmatic description of faces or geographical locations. This enigmatic combination of a pumpkin, a sweet potato, and a volume of Shakespeare's works nonetheless provides a revealing aspect of life in nineteenth-century America. Shakespeare's popularity during the daguerrean era led door-to-door salesmen to peddle copies of his works along with their pots and pans. In homes from the western frontier of Kentucky to New York City, a copy of the bard's plays often occupied a place next to the family Bible. Burlesque parodies of Shakespeare's plays were as popular as the new invention of photography. In one satirical soliloquy Macbeth asks his wife, "Or is that dagger but a false Daguerreotype?"

Learn more about early photography and daguerreotypes in our online exhibitions, Secrets of the Dark Chamber: The Art of the American Daguerreotype and American Photographs: The First Century.

Source: Merry A. Foresta. American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

Pictured: Unidentified, Still Life with Pumpkin, Book, and Sweet Potato, about 1855, daguerreotype with applied coloring (1/9 plate), 2 1/2 x 2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.