Image ID: AYCS

Walt Whitman Archive says: Carolyn Kinder Karr, in “A Friendship and a Photograph: Sophia Williams, Talcott Williams, and Walt Whitman” (American Art Journal vol. 21, no. 4, 1989, pp. 3–12), proposes that this photograph of Whitman, previously attributed to Thomas Eakins, was actually taken by Sophia Wells Royce Williams (1850–1928), a writer and the wife of journalist and editor of the Philadelphia Press, Talcott Williams (1849–1928), whom Whitman called his “ardent friend” (nyp.00459). Both were frequent visitors to Whitman’s Mickle Street home in Camden in the 1880s. They were friends of Thomas Eakins, who painted both their portraits. Carr offers evidence that Sophia Williams in 1896 submitted a copyright application for this photograph, and notes that at least one print of the photograph has written on the back: “Taken by Mrs Talcott Williams.” Carr also points out that the photograph was first published in 1889 in The Scottish Art Review by the Welsh writer and Whitman admirer Ernest Rhys, and that Rhys wrote to Whitman in 1888 that he had received the photograph from Sophia: “Mrs. Talcott Williams gave me on Tuesday evening two pictures of your house inside and out, shewing you seated by the window” (loc.03320). Horace Traubel published the photo in a 1905 Century article (“Walt Whitman in Camden”) and credited it “From a photograph owned by Mrs. Talcott Williams.” Carr points out that Traubel owned a print of the photograph, and she reprints a Traubel letter to Talcott Williams, in which he wrote that “[a] distinguished Englishman has been inquiring of me after the Whitman portrait Mrs. Williams took years ago—the one which counterfeits W. at parlor window.” Finally, Carr demonstrates that, while there is no record of the “picture-making event, . . . both Williamses seem to have been quite knowledgeable about photography which, through technological developments, had recently become more accessible to amateurs.”