Three years before her death in 1849 at age 81, Dolley Madison posed for photographer John Plumbe Jr. at his studio in Washington, D.C. Clad in a croc

The Smithsonian Acquires the Earliest Known Photograph of an American First Lady

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2024-07-02 16:30:14

Three years before her death in 1849 at age 81, Dolley Madison posed for photographer John Plumbe Jr. at his studio in Washington, D.C. Clad in a crocheted shawl and one of her famous turbans, carefully arranged to cover most of her dark curls, the former first lady met the camera’s gaze with a piercing yet inviting stare.

“She’s got this little hint of a smile,” Emily Bierman, global head of Sotheby’s photography department, tells the New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler. “You can tell she was a commanding and venerable woman.”

A surviving daguerreotype from this 1846 sitting recently resurfaced after decades in obscurity. Now identified as the earliest known photograph of an American first lady, the portrait went up for auction last week at Sotheby’s, where it fetched more than six times its estimated value of $50,000 to $70,000. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery paid $456,000 for the daguerreotype, which will reside in the museum’s permanent collection alongside the earliest known photograph of a United States president: an 1843 portrait of John Quincy Adams, acquired at auction for $360,500 in 2017.

Dolley served as first lady from 1809 to 1817. The wife of the U.S.’s fourth president, James Madison, she is regularly lauded for her expert hospitality and bravery during the War of 1812. When the British burned the White House in 1814, Dolley saved a portrait of George Washington from falling into enemy hands, telling servants to break the frame and extract its contents to avoid letting the president’s likeness “be mocked and desecrated,” wrote Smithsonian magazine’s Thomas Fleming in 2010.