Portraits of American women
A 1919 Boston collection by Gamaliel Bradford, published by Houghton Mifflin, presenting portraits of American women with a New England focus, drawn from the Smithsonian Libraries. The pictures are halftone studio portraits of older women in oval or round vignettes, many in profile or three-quarter view against soft, grey tonal backgrounds. A designer could take the oval and circle framing, the plain dark dress and lace caps as period costume, and the restrained, sober tone of early twentieth-century portrait printing.
