Rare ensemble of three staged ambrotypes, two quarter plates and one half plate, built around a single, theatrically minded sitter and a set of large placards. Period trade cards accompanying the group point to Buffalo, New York, where J. H. Tompkins operated as a daguerreotypist over 204 Main Street from roughly 1855 to 1859, and where Erastus B. Hambleton later maintained well-advertised ambrotype rooms on Main Street. Together they fix the milieu for the trio and help date the work to the late 1850s as ambrotypes supplanted daguerreotypes in Buffalo’s studios.

The sequence reads like parlor-stage farce captured for the camera. Quarter-plate no. 1 shows the bearded protagonist brandishing two sheets while presenting a boldly lettered sign that taunts, “Doubt, Eh? I’ll Bet a Fortune.” Quarter-plate no. 2 turns to romantic comedy: the same man, seated, points to a small cased image while a young woman leans in, amused, an unmistakable nod to the photographic keepsake as plot device. The half-plate finale escalates to slapstick: two women react as the man slumps beneath a large placard reading “SOLD!! By George — Goosey Forfeits,” the wording telegraphing that he has been well and truly “sold.” The penciled notes preserved with the trade cards, references to “late notice of the performance,” “Publisher’s Copy,” and a quip about a vest being released only “when he pays for it,” reinforce the theatrical framing and the send-up of subscription sales, IOUs, and public embarrassment.

“Goosey Forfeits” taps into a popular Victorian pastime. In countless parlor games, players who slipped up owed a “forfeit,” to be redeemed later through a mock-trial or comic penance; the penalty was often proclaimed by a judge or “crier,” sometimes by auction, using placards and exaggerated gestures for the entertainment of onlookers. Photographers readily borrowed that vocabulary for “conversation pieces” and comic tableaux. The language on the half-plate placard, with its emphatic “SOLD!!,” mirrors the idiom of forfeit games and the era’s broader culture of playful social shaming.

Buffalo provenance deepens the interest. Tompkins is documented at 204 Main in the ambrotype era; Hambleton’s well-known Main Street galleries became fixtures a decade later. The presence of both names among the ephemera suggests a studio ecosystem where props, placards, and scenario photography were common currency, and where customers could commission narrative images as souvenirs of club entertainments, amateur theatricals, or social pranks.

Subject, inscriptional wit, and intact Buffalo studio context make the set a pointed record of how mid-nineteenth-century photographers staged humor for the camera. The result preserves a miniature play in three acts: bravado, courtship, and comic comeuppance, exactly the arc familiar to period audiences from parlor “forfeits” and amateur theatricals.