The Studios of Charles Milton Bell

History of the Photographic Studio, 1873-1909

A history of Charles Milton Bell

By Dr. Kathleen Collins, The Washingtoniana, 1989 | edited 2020

Charles Milton Bell (1848-1893) was one of Washington's leading portrait photogra­phers during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He began work in photography as the youngest member of a family of photographers who operated a studio in the capital from about 1860 to 1874. Thomas and thirteen-year-old Nephi Bell, two sons of Francis Hamilton Bell, a gunsmith, first became photographers in the late 1850s, after the family moved to Washington from Fredericksburg, Virginia. In the early 1860s, Thomas and Nephi operated the Turner and Company studio on Pennsylvania Avenue and specialized in ambrotypes. The name was changed to Bell and Brother (Bell & Bro.) in 1862, and this studio eventually also provided employment to three other bothers and their father. Fran­cis and his sons William Hamilton, Jackson Wood, and Charles Milton operated the studio in various combinations during its decade and a half of existence. The firm was known as Bell and Hall during parts of 1866 and 1867, Allen F. Hall being the husband of Francis Bell's only daughter. In addition to portraits, Bell and Brother produced many carte-de­visite and stereograph views of Washington and operated a sales stand at the Smithsonian Institution, perhaps in exchange for photographic services provided to the Smithsonian. C. M. Bell and two brothers also started a photolithographic firm called Bell Brothers, a company established to take advantage of the presence of the Patent Office in Washington. (Complicating matters, there was a photographer in the city named William Bell, not a relative, who is remembered today for his work at the Army Medical Museum and on western survey teams after the Civil War.) The Bell and Brother studio had competition from James McClees, Mathew Brady, and Alexander Gardner, and so remained a minor establishment. Bell and Brother's attempts to deal in photographic equipment were unsuccessful.

Charles Milton Bell became a photographer at Bell and Brother in 1867, at the age of nineteen. In late 1873, C. M. Bell - as he was to be known professionally - left that studio and established his own business nearby on Pennsylvania Avenue. The two businesses overlapped for a time, but the success of C. M. Bell eventually eclipsed that of his father and brothers, who closed Bell and Brother about a year later. Francis and some of his sons worked for the C. M. Bell studio during its busiest years.

C. M. Bell became known as the photographer who had the largest collection of images of Washington notables, including politicians, and leading businessmen. He photographed embassy officials and distinguished visitors from other countries, black ministers and church leaders, members of Washington's educated and cultured black middle class, and leading educators and citizens, with familiar names like Gallaudet, Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan, Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Mary Walker, Edith Bolling, Mrs. Grover Cleveland, and Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell. The photographer had come a long way since 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln had declined an invitation for a portrait sitting.

Bell also photographed Washington baseball players, actors, and comedians. He pro­vided photographic copies of documents, works of art, and other photographs. A large number of amputees posed for Bell's camera. The purpose of before-and-after advertising and documentary photographs used by the local J.E. Hanger artificial limb company (which is still in existence). Architectural interiors and exteriors were photographed, primarily in the 21 x 26 cm (8 x 10 inch) and larger formats, and include major public buildings and residences, schools, churches, and some street scenes. He also photographed public events, such as openings of Congress, treaty signings, and parades. Bell enjoyed a congenial business relationship with the Grover Cleveland administration and made many portraits of the president's bride after their marriage. His portraits of the second Cleveland inauguration were published in the New York press. He managed to gain access with his camera to presidential assassin Charles Julius Guiteau in the District of Columbia Jail. He made scenic photographs along the Piedmont route of the Richmond and Danbury Railroad, which were shown at the New Orleans Exposition in 1884-85. Those images that were commercially popular were deposited for copyright by C. M. Bell in the Library of Congress after 1870, and examples of these photographs may be found under the photographer's name in the Library's cataloged collections. They are described below.

At the time, the studio had a reputation equaling that of Plumb's, Whitehurst's, or Mathew Brady's establishments. From the beginning, it was known as one of the most fashionable and best equipped photographic studios on the continent. In fact, Charles occupied the rooms that had been the Washington studio of Jesse Whitehurst, the capital's most fashionable studio during the 1850s. From there, Bell expanded rather quickly until his studio occupied four street numbers between 459 and 465 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, with an additional "West End Branch" at 701 Fifteenth Street NW, not far from the White House. The Pennsylvania Avenue studio was exquisite. Its salon was forty by sixty feet, with frescoed walls and a high-arched ceiling. Lace curtains covered broad windows that looked out over Washington's main thoroughfare. Its appointments included gilded cor­nices, an unusually large glass chandelier, and comfortably upholstered furniture. Of course, some of the best of Bell's photographic work on the walls were examples. The studio's operating room was equipped with two skylights of clear French plate glass. After 1876, it boasted a camera specially made by E. and H. T. Anthony for exhibition at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, a camera that some have claimed was the finest in the country.

C. M. Bell may be best known today for his Native Americans' photographs, which he began to produce in 1873. It was Ferdinand V. Hayden, director of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, who turned to him for the continuation of a project that had begun several years earlier. The assignment was to photograph as many of the Indian visitors to the capital as possible, during this period of intense treaty negotiations. A trip to the photographer's studio was apparently a reward accorded to cooperative chiefs. Hayden had employed photographers for the project from the studios of Washington photographers Alexander Gardner, A. Zeno Shindler, and Julius and Henry Ulke. In 1879, when Hayden's collection of negatives was turned over to the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, Bell continued to be of service. For the Smithsonian, he made the photographs used as the basis for some of the illustrations of Garrick Mallery's classic work, "Sign Language among North American Indians," published in the first annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1879-80.

Bell's Indian photographs have often been attributed to the survey photographer William Henry Jackson. It seems clear, however, that Bell did most of the Hayden survey's studio photography of Indians in Washington and also made prints for the survey. It is estimated that Bell produced about six hundred Indian portraits. Jackson seems to have limited his involvement to interviewing the Indians for information he incorporated into the catalog of the survey's collection. Although Jackson may also have helped pose Bell's Indian subjects on occasion, it seems likely that he was too busy printing and cataloging his own field photographs, preparing models and exhibits for the Centennial Exposition, and working on publications of the survey to do much original photography during the short winter seasons when he was in the capital.

From the end of the Hayden survey in 1879 until the 1890s, Bell also made photographs of Indians for the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of American Ethnology. In some cases, he also seems to have taken photographs of Indians entirely for his own purposes. Bell photographed many of the most prominent Indian leaders of his day in both individual and group portraits. Chief Joseph, Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, Medicine Crow, and Eskimizin were some of his well-known subjects. Stylistically, his Indian portraits fall into two broad groups. Those made for the Hayden survey and later for the Bureau of American Ethnology were simple busts of individuals seated in distinctly Victorian chairs. The backgrounds are plain. Generally, two shots were made of each person - a fairly direct front view and a side view. The second type of photograph, perhaps intended more often for Bell's own use, places the Indians amid the romantic properties of a late Victorian studio, the backdrops showing bucolic scenes, sometimes mixed with architectural balustrades and columns, with a choice of the usual assortment of paper-mache rocks, Victorian furniture, and ubiquitous twining ivy.

In time, the work of photographing the Indian visitors was undertaken by Smithsonian photographers, including John K. Hillers, William Dinwiddie, and De Lancey W. Gill. The Hayden Survey/Bureau of American Ethnology Collection, now in the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives, includes several hundred images by C. M. Bell, and some by the earlier Bell and Brother studio. Some of the negatives for these Indian portraits may be found in the Library of Congress collection of C. M. Bell studio negatives now on microfilm.

In the spring of 1893, while observing a naval review in Hampton Roads off Fort Monroe in Virginia, Charles Milton Bell suddenly became ill, and he died on May 12. (A notation about his death may be found in the studio logbooks on that date. See Lot 12250.) His wife, née Annie E. Colley, a native Washingtonian and daughter of the Windsor Hotel owner and leading dry goods merchant of the city, James W. Colley, took over the day-to-day operation of the studio, at times assisted by her two young sons. Annie C. Bell had difficulty keeping this large operation going, and so closed the West End (White House vicinity) branch. Gradually the buildings occupied by the main studio were reduced to one, and around the turn of the century, the business was sold to new proprietors, Atha and Cunningham, although Bell's name was retained. In 1907, the studio was moved to 1321 G Street NW, an effort to remain close to fashionable trade that had moved away from Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1909, however, the studio closed, having kept the C. M. Bell name and negative inventory until the end.

The negatives were then sold to another Washington photographer, I. M. Boyce. In I9I6, Boyce pulled many of the Indian negatives out of the main collection and tied to sell them to the Bureau of American Ethnology. (The sale was finally made in the 1950s by a son of Boyce's.) After various attempts to sell the remaining studio negatives, Boyce sold most of the collection to Alexander Graham Bell (no family relation to C. M. Bell) who was involved with the study of human heredity. In this collection, he saw not only impor­tant documentation of Washington's social and political history but also a great source for photographs of generations of the same families, ideal material for studying inherited physical traits. For a time, Alexander Graham Bell stored the negatives in the basement of his Volta Bureau in Georgetown. They were then donated to the American Genetic Association in Washington, which transferred the collection to several successive storage locations, including a basement and various farm buildings. The Library of Congress acquired the collection in 1975 from the American Genetic Association.

(NOTE: This article was written (1989) by Dr. Kathleen Collins as background information about Charles Milton Bell and his portrait studio was provided by James Glenn, deputy director, and archivist, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.)