A Winter Gallery — American Museum of Photography (SM)

Unidentified Studio (Possibly Notman & Fraser, Toronto, Ontario)

Winter Sports

Albumen Print, approximately 7 x 9 inches, circa 1885

The authorship of this photograph is something of a riddle. The studios of William Notman, headquartered in Montreal, became famous in the 1860s for their indoor images representing winter activities. Elaborate backdrops and props were employed along with combination printing techniques, retouching, and often hand-painting of the final print to create remarkably complex composite images.
Other studios in Canada and the United States also made winter scenes in the studio, although perhaps none were as ambitious or successful as the works of the Notman firm. Curiously, this albumen print was mounted on a thick chocolate-brown mount, with the photograph covering the imprint of “Millman, Successor to Eckerson & Millman, Hamilton (Ontario).” Over the years, the ink from the printed credit has caused the albumen print above it to lighten, resulting in a ghostly version of the original imprint.
John J. Millman was listed in the Hamilton directories as a “photographic painter” with the firm of Eckerson & Millman in 1876. A decade after that, in early 1886, he purchased the former business of the Notman & Fraser studio of Toronto. Millman sold that business about a year and a half later, in the fall of 1887. Subsequent owners of the studio marked their products with the legend “Notman & Fraser Negatives Preserved.” So perhaps this image originated with the Notman & Fraser firm but was printed by Millman or a successor –who chose to cover the outdated inscription on a printed mount rather than see it go to waste.

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Thanks to Tim McIntyre, Robert Lansdale, Robert Wilson and Hazel Mackenzie for their research contributions.

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