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Stebbins, Nathaniel L. (1847-1922) USA

Category: PHOTOGRAPHS

03476VNathaniel Livermore Stebbins (1847-1922) is recognized as one of the leading American maritime photographers.
He had roots in Massachusetts, but he was born on January 9, 1847 far from blue water in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The son of an influential Unitarian minister, Stebbins became fascinated with the sea at an early age and made at least one ocean voyage to South America as a passenger in a sailing vessel.

StebbinsOn March 6, 1872, he married Etta Bowles. They had three children; Ellen, Charles, and Katharine. He took up amateur photography about 1882 and became so involved that he gave up his regular business to become a photographer in 1884. He moved his family to the Boston, Massachusetts area to engage in this field, and joined yacht clubs in Boston and Marblehead. It is not known whether his photography business was his sole income; there are indications that either he or his wife had independent means, but little is known. Like his New York contemporaries, James Burton and Charles E. Bolles, and the somewhat younger Morris Rosenfeld and Edwin Levick, Stebbins accepted a wide variety of photographic commissions, but about 15,000 of his negatives apparently were of maritime subjects.

Yachting was Stebbins's particular interest. He joined the Corinthian and Eastern Yacht Clubs of Marblehead, as well as the Boston, Hull, and Massachusetts Yacht Clubs. He owned or chartered a number of yachts, including a 40-foot sloop, the 60-foot steam yacht Ella in 1890, and the 26-foot yawl Penguin in 1901. EllaTo photograph important races or commercial vessels he might charter a tugboat as a platform for his camera.

Nathaniel Stebbins worked up until his death in 1922 in West Somerville, Massachusetts, aged 75. Mrs. Katharine Stevens, a daughter of the photographer living in Vermont, written about his father:
« Cameras in those days were large, heavy things, and a box of glass plates in their holders was heavier. He sometimes had a boy to help carry them to the wharf, but I can still see his rather small, spry figure balancing by the rail in the heaving bow of the boat, while he lifted the great camera to get his shot. Of course we held our breaths, for he couldn’t swim a stroke. »

Book2Surviving business records and negative numbers suggest that Stebbins took about 25,000 photographs during a career that lasted from 1884 to 1922. After Stebbins's death, his glass plate negatives, prints, and photographic apparatus fell into the possession of Edward U. Gleason, a Boston photographer who for a few years had been associated with Stebbins. Gleason maintained possession of the materials until his death in 1928, at which point they were put up for sale with the intention that most of the plates would be recycled as panes of glass in a greenhouse. Two small collections of the plates were purchased by interested collectors; these collections eventually were acquired by the Peabody Museum of Salem, Massachusetts, and the Mariners Museum. The rest of the plates, prints, and photographic apparatus were purchased by Historic New England (then called the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, or SPNEA) and came into the organization's possession on May 24, 1929.

Stebbins sold many prints of his work, and he also produced several bound volumes of photographs of yacht types. His American and English Yachts (1887) with text by designer Edward Burgess, Book1and American and English Yachts (1887) were important early examples of this documentary use of marine photography. He followed these books with The Yachtsman's Album (1896) and The New Navy of the United States (1912). His photographs were also published in advertisements, and were used to illustrate magazines such as The Rudder. Even more ambitious was his Illustrated Coast Pilot (1891,1896), which offered the navigator photographic views of lighthouses, harbors, and landfalls on the Atlantic and, in the second edition, Gulf Coasts. In preparing for this photographic expedition Stebbins obtained a pilot's license for the northeast coast.

The largest published selections of Stebbins photographs can be found in two works by the maritime historian William H. Bunting, Portrait of a Port: Boston, 1852-1914 (Harvard University Press, 1971), which includes 90, and Steamers, Schooners, Cutters, and Sloops; Marine Photographs of N.L. Stebbins taken from 1884 to 1907 (Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1974), which includes 51 images and the best biography of Stebbins.

logo hne The Nathaniel L. Stebbins photographic collection consists of approximately 2,500 original negatives and approximately 6,700 original prints. Dating from the early 1880s to circa 1922, the majority of the images depict recreational sailing vessels, including several entrants in America's Cup races. Additional types of vessels include commercial sailing craft, steamships, ferries, tugs, and fire and police boats. Boatyards and other dockside facilities are also documented.

 

THE YACHTS OF AMERICA'S CUP: 442 PHOTOS DE NATHANIEL L. STEBBINS

1851-America

6 photos
1870-Idler

2 photos
1870-Dauntless

9 photos
1876-Madeleine

1 photo
1881-Mischief

3 photos
1881-Gracie

8 photos
1885-Puritan

26 photos
1885-Genesta

2 photos
1885-Priscilla

11 photos
1885-Pocahontas

2 photos
1886-Mayflower

24 photos
1886-Galatea

12 photos
1886-Atlantic

9 photos
1887-Volunteer

47 photos
1887-Thistle

12 photos
1893-Vigilant

105 photos
1893-Valkyrie II

63 photos
1893-Colonia

26 photos
1893-Jubilee

32 photos
1893-Pilgrim

13 photos
1895-Defender

35 photos
1895-Valkyrie III

12 photos
1899-Columbia

44 photos
1899-Shamrock

28 photos
1901-Constitution

3 photos
1901-Independence

13 photos
1901-Shamrock II

9 photos
1903-Reliance

12 photos
1903-Shamrock III

9 photos
 

 

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