Photograph, Cabinet

Description

This cabinet card photograph by James E. West, features Brother Charles Greaves, a member of the North Family at Mount Lebanon, NY. This particular copy was used by Lebanon Springs photographer, H. M. Gillet to order "steel engraving imitation" postcard that he sold under his own name without any credit to the original photographer. The back identifies this as "No. 66, A Shaker Brother, Mt. Lebanon, N. Y." It was to be printed with Gillet's imprint on the back of the card along with "(Made in Germany)." Gillet ordered 1000 copies of the card to be printed. It appears that West may have had this image printed as a postcard in the early 1900s. Accession number 1950.3280.1 in the Shaker Museum|Mount Lebanon collection is a non-divided back postcard bearing this image. The non-divided back on the postcard dates its publication to pre-1907 when the U.S. Postal Service allowed messages to be written on the back of cards. It also does not bear the number "66" or Gillet's name. This card has a hand-written caption that says "A Shaker Brother, Mount Lebanon, N. Y." There is a series of postcards with captions written in the same hand -- possibly a series of postcards issued by James E. West as the postcard craze started. The subjects of all of these postcards are all earlier West images. Accession number 1950.4154.1 is an example of the postcards produced in Germany for Gillet, and accession number 2006.21704.1 is a color lithograph version of the same image -- also published by Gillet. The color lithograph card bears the postmark 1912, suggesting that the steel engraving imitation cards were produced between 1907, the latest date Wests cards could have been done and 1912 when Gillet changed to the more modern color lithograph process.