My Daguerreotype Boyfriend

This special trove of boyfriends, newly unfrozen from a block of Antarctic ice, deserves a special mention. Submitted by Marian Phillips.

Alexander Stevens, chief scientist and geologist of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Ross Sea Party, an expedition that was stranded after their ship floated away to the sea during a massive blizzard.  From a recently-discovered cache of negatives found in a block of ice by the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust. (via BoredPanda)

Franz Liszt, Austrian-Hungarian composer, still looking quite foxy at 47 in 1858.

A physician whose speciality is the disorders of women and with whom I conversed as to the magic which our Liszt exercises on his public, smiled mysteriously and told many things of magnetism, galvanism, electricity, of contagion in an overheated hall…

—Heinrich Heine explains the phenomenon of Lizstomania in 1844.

Submitted by maidith

The handsomest young man in England!

appendixjournal:

Poet Rupert Brooke, who Yeats called “the handsomest young man in England” and who Virginia Woolf bragged about skinny-dipping with, posing as Comus, the Greek god of “nocturnal dalliances“ sometime prior to 1915, the year he died of an infected mosquito bite off the coast of Greece.

(via appendixjournal)

tuesday-johnson:

ca. 1850, [daguerreotype portrait of a gentleman, possibly a medical student or anthropologist, among a collection of skulls]

via the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

From the submitter maidith

Daguerreotype of Charles Des Voeux, taken in 1845. He was an officer aboard the HMS Erebus, one of the ships of the doomed Franklin Expedition.

From submitter fairweatherfrey:

Full-length portrait of an unidentified man, photographed by E. E. Henry between 1875 and 1885 in Leavenworth, Kansas.  From the Amon Carter Museum’s digital collection.

Damn, just look at that posture.

Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain c. 1851, when the author was just sixteen. This daguerreotype graces the cover of the second volume of Twain’s autobiography, which will be published on October 5, 2013.

1850’s daguerreotype of a unidentified man with black leather gloves.

Submitted by Sarah

Actor boyfriend!

From the submitter howpaperrusts:

“Pantomimist” 1870s, tintypes of Fawdon Vokes, né Walter Fawdon (from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Fall 2012)

“[He] joined the ranks of the Vokes Family, a group of London performers who toured the United States beginning in 1872. Somewhere on tour, perhaps in Philadelphia, Vokes stopped at a portrait studio to act his roles before the camera.”