This handsome late-Victorian cabinet card presents an unidentified man and woman posed closely together in a formal bust-length studio portrait, probably dating from the 1890s. Their relationship is not recorded, although their placement and complementary formal clothing suggest that they may have been a married or engaged couple. Both look slightly away from the camera with restrained expressions characteristic of nineteenth-century studio portraiture, while the soft vignette allows their figures to fade gradually into the pale background. The man wears a textured light-colored suit coat with broad lapels, a white standing collar, and a dark bow tie. His closely cropped hair and large, carefully shaped handlebar mustache give him a particularly memorable appearance. The woman wears a fitted dark dress with raised shoulders, contrasting lapels, decorative buttons, and a gathered high-necked blouse. Around her neck is an unusual openwork or linked choker, fastened at the center with a floral brooch, while a small hoop earring is visible at her left ear. The photographer was Henry William Immke, generally known professionally as H. W. Immke. He was born in Hessen, Germany, on March 9, 1839, and immigrated to the United States as a teenager. After working as a farmhand near Peru, Illinois, he studied photography in Chicago from 1863 to 1866 under Samuel M. Fassett, who operated one of the country’s largest photographic studios. While employed there, Immke photographed Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession as it passed through Chicago on May 1, 1865. Immke married Mary Steinbrook in 1864, and they eventually had four children. The family moved to Princeton in 1866, where he opened a photographic gallery and remained in business until his retirement in 1923. After an early studio building burned, he eventually established his long-running “Gallery of Art” at 819 North Main Street. Over the course of his career, he reportedly produced at least 30,000 glass-plate photographs, primarily portraits of Princeton and Bureau County residents. Approximately 20,000 of his negatives survive in the collection of the Bureau County History Center, making his work an unusually valuable visual record of the community. Immke retired in 1923 and moved to South Dakota to live with his daughter Minnetta. He died in 1928. Princeton is located in north-central Illinois. During the cabinet-card era, it was a prosperous regional center connected to Chicago and other markets by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, which reached Princeton in 1854 and stimulated considerable local growth. The community was also known for its association with Owen Lovejoy and the Underground Railroad. The cream-colored front mount is ruled with fine brown lines. The reverse is especially attractive and displays a large allegorical figure of a winged woman standing or moving above a globe surrounded by clouds. She blows a long trumpet with one hand and carries a cornucopia, or horn of plenty, in the other. The round objects spilling from the cornucopia appear to be coins falling toward North America. The figure combines imagery associated with Fame, represented by the trumpet, and Fortune or Abundance, represented by the cornucopia and coins. SOLD
THE CABINET CARD GALLERY 
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