This distinguished looking gentleman appears to be holding a baton or thin handle in one hand. Blue tint has been applied to his shirt. The image was a daguerreotype, the earliest photographic process. No negative was used, the image was produced directly on the silver-plated sheet of metal that we see pictured here, then covered with a sheet of clear glass and gold-colored brass mat. The flowery edge is formed by another piece of thin brass that folds around the edges of the daguerreotype, mat and glass cover, helping to hold them all together while producing this decorative frame. That is called a ‘preserver’ and is one clue as to the age of the image, though not entirely reliable since it was a simple enough matter to move a preserver from one daguerreotype, and put it on another.

This public domain image was taken by the well-known African-American daguerreotypist, Augustus Washington, probably between 1854 and 1858. Augustus has a studio in Hartford Connecticut from 1847 to 1848, and then again in 1850 to 1854. He sold the gallery in 1854 to G. W. Davis, and left for Liberia with The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, an organization formed in 1817 to resettle Afro-Americans in Liberia. Washington continued taking photographs in Liberia, including most of the heads of state for that young nation. The image above is one such image, though whether the subject is African or an African-American immigrant, we don’t know. By about 1858 the declining popularity of the daguerreotype, and difficulty obtaining photographic materials, led Washington to abandon photography to spend more time on his other endeavors, such as running the sugar cane plantation he purchased there.