Carte de visite by Jacob Shew of San Francisco, Calif. Victorians were preoccupied with death, a fascination reflected in their elaborate mourning rituals and macabre humor. The practices and sentiments rippled across the Atlantic as a bloody war divided the United States. Drew Gilpin Faust, in “This Republic of Suffering,” observed, “In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.”
This photograph of two men, with inscriptions in word bubbles, reveals the juxtaposition of the vibrancy of life against the inevitability of death:
“Great World ‘dis, hey cap!”
“Yes, very few git out alive”
A tax stamp on the back of the mount dates this image from 1864-1866.
Photographer Jacob Shew (1826-1879) is one of four brothers who pioneered daguerreotypy and the photographic arts. Jacob, Myron, Truman and William studied photography with Samuel F.B. Morse, an early practitioner of the daguerreotype process, and worked for another early daguerreotypist, John Plumbe. Jacob went on to become one of the earliest photographers working in San Francisco. In 1852, he and his brothers were hired by another daguerreian pioneer, John Wesley Jones, to photograph California, Nebraska, and Utah, including Mormon and Native American communities. Jones and the Shew boys produced 1,500 plates that formed the basis for a massive painting, “Jones’s Great Pantoscope,” that toured Eastern cities.
A death notice in the February 8, 1879, edition of The Pacific Bee describes Jacob’s demise.
Jacob Shew, the old and well-known photographer, committed suicide this morning by blowing his brains out. His assistant, Mr. White, left him in the reception room of his gallery, No. 914 Market street, about half-past nine. On his return at 10 o'clock White found the door to the room locked. Letting himself in, he went upstairs to the operating room, where he found the body of Mr. Shew lying on the floor, the head resting in a pool of blood flowing from his right temple, and the pistol with which the deed had been committed in his right hand. A dirk lay on a table nearby, but had not been used. The act is attributed to pecuniary embarrassment, as deceased had of late been pushed for money and was unable to pay rent, which fell due today. Mr. Shew was one of the earliest photographers of the city, a native of Saratoga county, New York, and aged 52 years. He was unmarried.
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