“A new show at the Concord Museum takes portraiture to unexpected places.” — The Boston Globe

Portrait Mode

Portrait Mode offers an intimate look at over 40 historical portraits from the Concord Museum collection, highlighting poignant stories of representation and absence and inviting us to consider whose faces become a part of history.  

During the nineteenth century, new forms of technology such as silhouettes and photographs made it possible to create inexpensive portraits. From the tiny photographs preserved in lockets and tintype albums to silhouettes and oil paintings, this special exhibition offers powerful glimpses of how portraits were used as tools of memory-making; how information has been lost over time; and how portraits served as a tool of self-fashioning and making an individual life visible.  

Featured objects include a rare carte de visite photograph of Jack Garrison, a free African American man who contributed to Concord’s community and antislavery movement in the mid-nineteenth century; a mysterious oil painting misidentified as Henry David Thoreau in the early twentieth century; and evocative portraits of unidentified subjects, including ambrotypes, cabinet cards, and photograph albums. 

On view in Gross Family Gallery at the Concord Museum, Portrait Mode explores how we can understand the role of portraits in documenting individual lives, the many missing faces from our history, and how we might continue to imagine and represent their experiences. 

Images:

Jack Garrison, Horton, Boston, MA, mid-19th century.  Concord Museum Collection, Gift of Mrs. Olive Brooks Banks; Pi1120a.

Miss Elisha [Alicia] Keyes, Boston, Ma, late 19th century.  Concord Museum Collection, Gift of Katherine E. Drier; 1994.55.28.

Unknown Portrait, 19th century. Concord Museum Collection, Gift of Members of the Concord Antiquarian Society; Th42. 

Civil War Soldiers, mid-19th century.  Concord Museum Collection; Pi1166.1aa.