Her personal archive of approximately 350 photographs. [Hampstead and elsewhere], 1858-1864

This tremendous discovery is the extensive photographic archive of the little-known Victorian photographer Emma Frances Johnston. This is apparently the earliest comprehensive archive of a female photographer in private hands. Beginning around 1858, Johnston made this wonderful series of portraits of her friends and extended family comprising the intellectual and social world of nineteenth- century Hampstead in London.

$245,000

Leaves of Grass [with] Whitman’s own copy of his 1860 portrait. Brooklyn, New York, 1855

First edition, first issue, one of only 337 copies of the first issue, distinguished by its elaborately gilt-stamped cloth binding prepared in June/July 1855. Whitman reported that only 800 copies were printed; this copy is from the first group to be bound. The copies bound later did not have the extensive gilt stamping. Whitman paid for the book, supervised its production, and even set a number of pages in type.

two items: $160,000

Photograph inscribed and signed by Albert Einstein. [Berlin], 1927

Albert Einstein on the Jewish people: “we Jews are not a chosen people, but one that has been strained and steeled by millennia of pressure.” On this dramatic portrait of Einstein at age 48, made at the height of his fame, the scientist writes:

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Photographic portrait inscribed by Whitman with four lines from “Salut au Monde!”. Toronto: Edy Brothers, 1880

A rare portrait with a Leaves of Grass quotation in Whitman’s hand. The photogenic and self-promoting poet sat for (and gave away) many photographs, but very
rarely did he inscribe them with his verse. Here he writes lines from his poem “Salut au Monde!”—his “calling card to the world, as well as one of his most successful compositions.”

$75,000

Portrait of Abraham Lincoln with his son Tad. Washington, February 5, 1865

Perhaps the most delightful of the Lincoln family photographs, this portrait shows an impish Tad leaning on a table as his seemingly bemused father sits on Gardner’s studio chair. Thomas “Tad” Lincoln was the youngest of the Lincoln boys.

$65,000

A collection of images associated with South Carolina physician and plantation owner Sidney Smith. South Carolina, 1845-50

A unique survival. This important collection of largely identified photographs documents the home and family of Dr. Sidney Smith and those he enslaved at Gravel Hill, his South Carolina plantation. The collection includes an extraordinary daguerreotype depicting Dr. Smith, his two daughters, and his brother, posed together with two enslaved African American men. This is one of the earliest known images—if not the very earliest photograph—of an identified plantation owner posing with enslaved African Americans.

$60,000

Ulysses S. Grant. Washington, c. 1865

$52,000

Profile bust portrait of Charles Darwin, signed by Cameron. London: Colnaghi, 1868

The great Darwin portrait, Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1868 profile of Darwin is probably the most famous photograph of a 19th-century scientist. Darwin remarked, “I like this photograph very much better than any other which has been taken of me.”

$52,000

Original glass plate interpositive prepared by Curtis for the printing of The North American Indian. Curtis, 1924

This is a splendid original glass plate made for Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian, the greatest photographic work on Native Americans. Curtis, one of the greatest American artists of his era, was the most celebrated photographer of North American Indians.

$35,000

Armstrong and Aldrin raising the U.S. flag on the Moon’s surface. NASA, [1969]

Signed by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first two men on the Moon. This image was taken by the Maurer Data Acquisition Camera (DAC, pronounced “dak”). The DAC made films through the Lunar Module Pilot’s window during the approach and landing of the LM and took stop motion photographs during the EVA at the rate of one frame per second.

$32,000