It may be that earlier in the century, American women and men had only a hazy apprehension of their facial qualities. When itinerant painter James Guild offered a young girl a portrait in exchange for washing his shirt, it “looked more like a strangle[d] cat than it did like her,” but he “told her it looked like her and she believed it.” Diary entries and letters relied on well-worn and indefinite figures of speech to describe beauty—“a charming mingling of the rose & lily”—that could be visualized in any number of ways. Many people owned mirrors, but their quality was uneven. When Maria Lydig Daly stayed overnight in a room with a bad looking glass, she “looked so old and ugly that I felt distressed,” and was relieved to return home to her familiar mirror. “How few of us have a perfect idea how we look, or who we resemble, or look like,” photographer H. J. Rodgers observed, “we look differently in as many mirrors as we may choose to scrutinize.” Portraits commissioned by wealthy Americans, painted by artists versed in a visual language that expressed beauty, character, and social role, tended to idealize and flatter. The less affluent hired itinerant painters to render their likenesses, but these portraits merely conveyed general facial features and hair style and used personal possessions—a tool, a book—to represent the sitter's individuality. When it came to the celebrated beauties of the period, art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes, there was a “frequent dissonance between written accounts and the visual record.” Diarist Emma Holmes was “dreadfully disappointed” when she finally met Mary Withers, the “far famed beauty.” Withers had “by no means a beautiful complexion,” complained Holmes; “it was ordinary and I expected an extraordinary one, from all the praises bestowed on it.”16
Over the course of the nineteenth century, mirrors, fashion plates, printed engravings, and chromolithographs streamed into Americans’ lives, but it was the advent of photography in 1839 that most changed how people knew their appearances. At first photographs were treated as articles of memory and contemplation, readily incorporated into the Victorian cult of sentimentality. But new techniques and formats quickly made photographs cheap and widely available. In the 1860s, the carte-de-visite craze struck middle-class Americans, who traded and collected each other's card-sized portraits. At the same time, the ferrotype or tintype became the “picture for the million.” Farmers, artisans, and working women earning a modest income purchased miniature “gem” tintypes, a dozen for a dime or quarter. Thus the photograph rapidly found a place in family and social life—in parlor albums, on jewelry, and as postcards and calling cards.17
Americans went to the photography studio ready for a performance, as historian Alan Trachtenberg aptly describes it, “the making of oneself over into a social image.” They appeared dressed in their Sunday clothes, laden with jewelry, primed to hold a pose or expression. Elite photographers Southworth and Hawes hired fashion advisers to guide female patrons “in arranging their dress and drapery”; for the ordinary studio, leaflets entitled “Pretty Faces” and the like instructed the photographer how to “answer all vexatious questions put to you by your sitters.”18
What most vexed the public was that the photograph revealed the face and body with a degree of detail and precision never before seen. Its realism raised questions about the body and identity: Did photography capture only surface appearances, or did it represent the inner self? As the photograph became a popular commodity, it made beauty a more problematic category. What had once been a matter more for the imagination and the mirror was now externally fixed on the photographic plate. Believed to be factual, photographs measured the distance between idealized representations and real faces. Many photographers applauded this failure to flatter; others adopted painterly techniques of lighting and pose in the interest of offering a more penetrating—and pleasing—likeness.
From the sitters’ perspective, however, the photograph pulled in another direction, toward a critical assessment of appearance itself. The pictorial truth could be quite painful, and patrons leaving the photographer's studio often looked dismayed. A Massachusetts woman recalled her experience before the camera: “After various sittings most unsatisfactory—one with the mouth too large, another with the expression too grave, a third presenting an affected style, with a kind of contraction very unnatural about the lips—I shook my head and turned disgusted away.” In these “permanent mirrors,” wrote an amateur photographer, “our self-love does not always permit us to look with pleasure.”19
In response, sitters often demanded retouched or tinted pictures. Photographers ridiculed customers who would “not care to have their own faces enamelled” but insisted on a “highly-retouched fraud which represents them as marble.” They developed techniques to apply colored powder, often ladies’ rouge, to negatives and prints, so that “the coarse skin texture, the pimple and freckle blemishes were converted into fine, soft complexions.” Artistic photographers delicately colored the entire picture—face, clothing, and background—to create the illusion of nature. But in the cheap photograph factories, employees rubbed just a blush of red pigment on the cheeks and gold flecks on the jewelry, with the image otherwise untouched. This convention was artifice that revealed itself—a bit of color to signify the living person.20
If retouching and tinting lessened the gap between self-image and the camera eye, so did cosmetics. American women who ordinarily shunned paint requested it at photographers’ studios. “All kinds of powders and cosmetics were brought into play, until sitters did not think they were being properly treated if their faces and hair were not powdered until they looked like a ghastly mockery of the clown in a pantomime,” photographer Henry Peach Robinson complained. At a cheap studio on the Bowery, where clerks and shopgirls came to be photographed on Sundays, the owner observed, “I have known colored ladies to sit for tintypes and they ask me why I didn't put a little more rouge on their cheeks.” H. J. Rodgers's manual of photography reveals explicitly how image making intensified attention to the face and, for women, justified cosmetics use. Rodgers viewed male sitters simply as character “types”—such as the “rough,” the gentleman, and the dandy—but believed that photography could capture each woman's unique beauty. His manual offered ample advice to women on clothing styles, colors, and how to compose expression. Despite his advocacy of nature and hygiene, Rodgers nonetheless concluded his book with page after page of cosmetics recipes.21
As new visual technologies began to standardize female appearance, those standards became increasingly defined by actresses and professional beauties—no longer seen as women of questionable morality, but rather as celebrities and stars. Although Americans had been enchanted by such performers as Jenny Lind and Fanny Kemble in the antebellum period, women achieved new prominence on the stage after 1860. Many were players in serious drama, but the most visible and controversial performed in burlesques and variety shows that combined sexual display with comic dialogue. Such stars as Adah Menken and Lydia Thompson brought to the American theater a new kind of performance that blurred the line between scripted roles and stage personae based on their real lives. Their novel self-presentation included bleached hair and even paint, inspiring the most daring women to emulate them.22
Objects of a budding cult of celebrity, actresses and professional beauties were viewed, talked about, and incorporated visually into Americans’ private lives. As early as the 1860s, observers noted the rising “commercial value of the human face.” Photographs of the prominent flooded the market—not only generals, politicians, and ministers, but thespians, ballet dancers, and burlesque stars. Pictures of actresses in and out of their stage roles appeared in urban shop windows, mail-order catalogues, and theater doorways. Middle-class Americans often placed these images in their personal albums, often on the same pages as photographs of family and friends.23
Making faces into “pictures for the public gaze” involved the frank use of makeup commonly used in the theater. Actresses’ photographs display smooth and flawless skin, as well as the use of eyeliner and lip pencil. By the 1880s, Lillie Langtry, Adelina Patti, and other performers