Titled by later tradition as “The Ice Man,” a compelling quarter-plate daguerreotype by Southworth & Hawes presents a deceased man in profile, laid out for viewing with blocks and shards of ice packed around the head and shoulders to retard decomposition during the sitting. The vantage is intimate and theatrical: the head gently tilted, the eyelids closed, the light grazing the forehead and jaw while crystalline ice catches specular highlights at the margins. The image comes from the Feigenbaum post-mortem group, Lot 11, long discussed among specialists for the documentary clarity with which it records period mortuary practice.

Southworth & Hawes operated in Boston, 1843–1862, and were celebrated for transforming the daguerreotype from mere likeness into high art through refined lighting, close framing, and purposeful staging. Their studio is associated with some of the most iconic images of the daguerreian era, from eminent New England sitters to medical and scientific subjects. Post-mortem commissions formed a discreet but meaningful part of nineteenth-century portrait practice, and the partnership’s command of oblique light and sculptural modeling lends even a memorial subject a grave serenity consistent with their aesthetic.

Ice as a preservative and cooling agent was widely used in the pre-embalming decades before and during the early 1850s. Undertakers advertised “corpse coolers,” ice boxes, and zinc-lined coffins for temporary preservation so families could gather and, when desired, so a photographer could make a likeness before burial. Among documented daguerreian post-mortems, images that clearly show the body surrounded by visible ice are extraordinarily scarce; to the consignor’s and our research knowledge, this is the only known daguerreotype in which the cooling medium is so plainly depicted as part of the composition, making it an important visual document of antebellum funerary practice as well as a powerful work from the foremost American daguerreotype partnership.

Quarter plate daguerreotype, approximately 3¼ x 4¼ in. Provenance: Feigenbaum auctions, Post-Mortem Lot 11. Likely Boston, ca. 1848–1855. An exceptional convergence of art history, social history, and mortuary science, and a centerpiece image for any collection of nineteenth-century photography.