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Although the identity of these sitters is unknown, much can be inferred about these individuals and their circumstances through visual clues.

The nicely painted background and tree trunk prop in the Snyder & Walton photograph suggest that the studio served an upper-middle class clientele. The woman’s immaculate clothing provides further proof of this.

The portrait of the man, however, is a collage of the sitter's image pasted onto an ornate background. This presentation suggests that the man could not afford to sit for a portrait at a more well-resourced studio.

The details of these different studio settings showcase the divergent socioeconomic statuses and experiences that African Americans had in the aftermath of slavery. The portraits also show that the desire to signal a refined appearance to counter racial stereotypes was one that crossed class boundaries.

Snyder & Walton, [Unidentified Young African American Woman], ca. 1893. Albumen on cabinet card mount.

A scrapbook, in essence, is many times a volume of repurposed works of art. Sometimes the scrapbook itself is repurposed. This one is both.

Homemade paper dolls clipped from periodical fashion plates, handmade wardrobes and dressers, and clothing made from colored tissue paper fill the pages of this 1870s geography textbook. With a pasted label warning, "this book must be covered, not be scribbled upon, kept clean, and paid for if not returned when demanded" during its time as a textbook, it is imperfectly perfect in form and function as a work of "idiosyncratic" art and an historical visual material.

Composed with colors in autumnal shades, this watercolor by Boston architect Lois Lilley Howe speaks to the artist's hand and eye needed in the profession. Howe was a founding partner in 1890 in Howe, Manny & Almy, the second women-owned architectural firm in the United States.

Lois Lilley Howe, [Landscape View of Possibly the White Mountains], ca. 1925

The Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning Collection contains several 19th- and 20th-century portrait photographs of members of the extended Black families descended from the relationship of Richard Codgell, South Carolina merchant and enslaver, and Sarah Sanders, an enslaved woman in his household. The portraits embody an anti-racist, counter archive to contemporaneous collections of racist imagery and caricatures.

Probably a Black family member or friend took this snapshot in the backyard of the residence of Miranda Cogdell Venning, granddaughter of Sarah Sanders. There is both a formalness and candidness to the sitters’ mannerisms in this image taken at the family home. Miranda, probably the woman seated on the hammock, was the first African American graduate of the Philadelphia Girls High School and Normal School. A school principal, she died of tuberculosis one year after this view was taken. She was thirty-eight years old.

The acquisition of 151 watercolor views of Philadelphia by Benjamin R. Evans was the first significant acquisition by the Graphic Arts Department.

Commissioned by antiquarian Ferdinand Dreer, Evans created many drawings on site and based others on photographs or earlier artwork. Evans’s views focused on small shops and modest buildings, like Enoch’s Variety Theatre, rather than city landmarks and portrayed a world far neater and homogeneous than the actual city.

One of the first American popular graphics art work purchased for the Print Department, this print purports to be an accurate depiction of George Washington’s final hours and was published shortly after his December 1799 death.

Martha Washington watches from the foot of the bed while two physicians attend to the former president. The artist, however, made the decision to not include any of the enslaved people in the Washington household whose presence at the deathbed was recorded in contemporary written descriptions and other later 19th-century visual depictions of the scene.

The Graphic Arts Collection is home to a large collection of posters from World War I, the provenance of which is largely unknown since most of them are backed with linen. However, this poster provides curators with clues on the collection's origins.

A manuscript note on the back of the poster, which is not backed by linen, indicates that it was brought by Corinne Keen Freeman in 1919 for display at LCP's Juniper Street building.

Freeman was the chairperson of the South Philadelphia Women's Auxiliary Liberty Loan Committee, which worked to get community members signed up for loan subscriptions that helped the U.S. pay for the war effort.

It wasn't until 1980, however, that our more than 300 WWI posters were formally added into the collection.