A daguerreotype portrait of Native American man in Indian dress, "High Toes (or Man on a Cloud), Cheyenne," hand-tinted gold. The photograph is one of a series a of portrait daguerreotypes made of Native American chiefs while they crossed the country to meet with US Government officials in Washington, DC. When passing through St. Louis, Missouri, in 1851-52 these chiefs were photographed by photographers Thomas Easterly and John Fitzgibbons. Each portrait was a unique image. Daguerreotypes had no negatives; each photograph was exposed on a silver-nitrate covered copper plate. Daguerreotypes remained a popular method of capturing portraits from 1840 to 1860 when it was replaced with easier and less hazardous methods of negative-positive based photography like wet-plate collodion and albumen. The image is not matted or cased.
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