These two albumen photos of Sarah Helen Whitman are pasted into a copy of her 1853 edition of poetry, Hours of Life and Other Poems, that she inscribed and gifted to her friend, William Coleman. Coleman was a photographer in Providence that took multiple photos of Whitman during his career, and aided Whitman in making copies of her daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe (she later gifted the original daguerreotype to Coleman, who then left it to Brown University after his death).

The two photos of Whitman below are examples of those taken by Coleman.

Whitman presented the volume to Coleman just ten days before her death, but the exact dates of these photographs pasted inside are unknown. Brown dates them between 1853 and the year Whitman died, 1878. While those dates are accurate, they are broad.

It is also undetermined whether Whitman herself pasted them inside the gifted volume or Coleman pasted them after receiving it, having had copies and/or negatives of the photos in his portfolio.

The left photo depicts Whitman at three-quarters view. Her dark brown hair is parted in the middle and tucked behind her customary headwear.

The right photo depicts Whitman in an unusual pose, garbed as a medium and ready for a séance. A faint outline of her nose and closed eyes are directed downward behind a veil as she gathers messages from a manuscript pressed to her head, delivered to her by the spirit world. In a July 18, 1860 letter to her friend, Julia Deane Freeman, Whitman writes: “I will send you, too, before the Harvest Moon, a little daguerre just taken if I can get it copied—for my sister will not part with the original. It is a funny little thing & shows only a piece of the face but all of my friends like it & I think you will. All my poetical friends like it, I should have said, for the practical & matter of fact think the face is too much concealed” (Kunce, 146-147). Given the obvious impracticality of this picture (since her face is virtually hidden) and the description of a concealed face, it is very possible that this is the photo she is referring to in her letter to Freeman. That tells us the original was a daguerreotype, and it was taken in July 1860. The albumen copy would have been made from a glass negative made from the daguerreotype. If this is the case, then the original daguerreotype has not surfaced. If this is not the case, there is another, undiscovered photo of Whitman that she is describing to Freeman.

Whitman’s edition of Hours of Life and Other Poems inscribed to Coleman with these photos pasted inside are kept in the Harris collection at the John Hay Library.