Diamond ring by Taffin, $387,500
CHICAGO – 2021 was a year of records at Hindman Auctions. The auction firm reported $87 million in total sales for the year, its highest total by a wide margin in the company’s 39-year history, setting more than 30 individual auction records along the way.
Daguerreotype portrait of Henry Fitz Jr. taken in January 1840.
Price realized (for photographic archive): $300,000
CINCINNATI – On November 15, Hindman Auctions sold one of the earliest photographic portraits taken in America as part of a collection of photographs that realized $300,000. The archive was purchased by a midwestern museum. Offered in The Henry Fitz Jr. Archive of Photographic History auction, the photographs were recently rediscovered after lying for 87 years in an unheated shed in Peconic, New York. The cache included photographs of Henry Fitz Jr. (1808-1863) and his family taken between 1840 and 1842 as well as early telescopes and other optical devices.
Daguerreotype portrait of Henry Fitz Jr., taken in January 1840, one of the earliest surviving photographic portraits taken in America. It is one of 22 daguerreotypes in the Fitz archive, which is estimated at $150,000-$300,000.
CINCINNATI – On November 15, Hindman Auctions will offer The Henry Fitz Jr. Archive of Photographic History. Forgotten since the 1930s, a cache of some of the earliest photographic portraits taken in America was recently discovered in an unheated shed near Peconic, Long Island. It has been heralded as a “national, if not international treasure” by Grant Romer, a photo historian and Curator Emeritus of the George Eastman Museum, the world’s recognized home of photographic history. The archive consists of 22 daguerreotype portraits of Henry Fitz Jr. and his family taken between 1840 and 1842. Absentee and Internet live bidding will be available through LiveAuctioneers.
