Damaged as it is, this card advertising James S. Cummins‘ (1841-1895) move from partnership to independence was an exciting find. While the 1881 date of his split from Franklin Kuhn (b. abt. 1830, Md.) is not unknown, it is rare to find a card in which a photographer narrates such a move so explicitly.
Kuhn soon went into business with John Philip Blessing (1835-1911). According to Kelbaugh’s Directory of Maryland Photographers 1839-1900 and my own research, Cummins remained independent throughout the 1880s and 1890s, later locating at 40 W. Lexington Street.
The oversized initial “C” became his standard mark, here combined with a profusion of vines, birds, animals, latticework and leaf patterns. Later he elaborated the mark by overlaying a similar “J” and an “S”.
Visual tropes of nature combine with artifice: Rabbits play amid abstract decoration, and a trompe l’oeil pastoral scene curls out beyond the picture plane. These devices signal the photographer’s claim to the status of artist.
Advertisers like Cummins would have been able to choose from a wide variety of such visual elements from pattern books at job printing businesses such as that of W. L. Stork & Co. A 920-page 1906 catalog for the American Line Type Company includes, for example, pages and pages of ornaments, frames and borders.
Ornamental patterns could be found in influential resources such as Owen Jones’ 1868 The Grammar of Ornament, which gathered together examples from a wide range of cultures and periods. Jones highlighted the connections between patterns in nature and those in decoration as key to beauty.
Stork is listed in the 1882 directory Industries of Maryland: A Descriptive Review of the Manufacturing and Mercantile Industries of the City of Baltimore as located at 220 W. Baltimore Street. Founded in 1865, Stork & Co. both produced stationery and carried on a printing and engraving concern with a combined staff of 30.
The same volume offers a vivid description of what Cummins’ gallery looked like:
“The visitor to his gallery will find a large and splendidly furnished reception room and a magnificent gallery of photography. Its walls are covered with exquisitely executed photographs in crayons, pastels, India ink, etc.”
James Cummins’ 1881 declaration of independence began 15 years of photographic productivity that ended with his death from pneumonia in Baltimore, the city of his birth, in 1895.
For an overview of the Aesthetic Movement and its influence on decorative arts in the US, see In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986).
Cardtography 