Quarter-plate daguerreotype records a studio “specimen board” packed with thirteen small oval portraits set within an ornate painted cartouche. The selection advertises range and skill: a father with child, a refined lady, a sharp profile study, a heavily bearded man in work clothes identifiable as a gold-rush miner, an elderly subject, and what appears to be a post-mortem likeness, along with additional men and women presented as singles and pairs. A blank heraldic shield at center anchors the display, a familiar decorative device from daguerreian shop signs and broadsides.

Specimen boards were the nineteenth-century equivalent of a studio portfolio. Daguerreians built them from small plates copied from customer images and arranged on a painted panel, then set the board in a window or carried it to attract sitters. The practice is well documented in San Francisco during the early to mid 1850s, when photographers catered to miners and families and openly offered “likenesses of the dead.” Studios run by R. H. Vance and William Shew promoted exactly this mix of subjects and often used elaborate display graphics. Without a printed imprint the plate cannot be assigned securely, yet the miner portrait and the sales-minded ensemble argue for a California origin in the gold-rush decade.

The daguerreotype functions as a photograph of the finished board rather than as the board itself, a compact record a proprietor could keep, duplicate, or send to another location. As a visual document it captures the full menu of services a successful gallery wished to sell: children and families, elegant profiles, occupational portraits, elders, and memorial pictures. Few such advertising images survive, and even fewer preserve a miner and a post-mortem in the same frame, making the plate a concise study of western studio practice at mid-century.