Highlights Archives
Simon L Stein's Portraits of Leading Citizens
In 1913 well-known Milwaukee portrait photographer, Simon L. Stein, contacted the Society with a plan. He proposed to donate around 500 portraits of leading Wisconsin citizens, those "men and women who have attained a position of sufficient prominence … in various walks of life," to the Society along with detailed biographical information that would be of practical use for genealogists, historians or any other person interested in those Wisconsinites who had "left footprints of intrinsic value." Stein's high-quality portraits (along with a few from his son Julian) are the subject of this month's featured gallery from Wisconsin Historical Images, the Society's online image database.
Stein's Background
Born in Austria in 1854, Simon Leonard Stein immigrated to the United States in 1866 after the untimely death of his parents. He settled in Chicago, where he studied under photographer A.J. Lawson, before relocating to Milwaukee. There, he took a new position retouching photographs for Hugo von Broich, eventually purchasing the studio of Broich and Cramer in 1879 and opening the S.L. Stein Studio at North Third Street and State.
During his career, Stein's work won 29 medals in exhibitions ranging from the Exposition Universelle in Paris and the World's Columbian International Exposition to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the Pan-Pacific International Exposition. He also helped to perfect the Lumiere and English color plate process and discovered a way of printing photographs directly on various metals, including gold, silver and bronze. Despite such contributions to the developing world of photography, Stein was a portrait photographer by trade. He produced prints of exceptional quality, so much so that prominent individuals from across the nation took note and requested that he take their portraits.
About the Collection
In offering up a collection of portraits to the Society, Stein promised to take photos "in the most artistic manner I know." The majority of the photographs consist of handsomely lit and composed head-and-shoulder-style portraits, with occasional full-length shots. The prints are of exceptional quality on heavy photographic stock. Most are signed below the portrait by the subject.
To add value to the portraits, he prepared a form soliciting biographical details from his subjects and attached it to the back of each print. Information requested included their date and place of birth, when they came to Wisconsin and where they settled, where educated and any degrees, public or military service, date and place of marriage, and name of spouse, names of children, occupation, address and remarks. Only a few portraits are missing this information.
Prior to his death in 1922, Stein donated a total of 382 portraits. His son Julian continued his father's work, adding 47 of his portraits to the collection, for a total of 429. Among those depicted are Neenah manufacturer F.J. Sensenbrenner, educator Ellen Clara Sabin, physician Horace Manchester Brown and Milwaukee Judge Adelbert J. Hedding. Most date from between 1902 and 1937.
Genealogical Significance
All of the names and biographical information from these Stein photographs will soon be added to the Wisconsin Genealogy Index, a pilot effort to tie the portrait subjects in Wisconsin Historical Images to the Wisconsin Name Index to make photos more easily accessible to genealogists. If you order a reproduction of a Stein portrait, a copy of the biographical sketch (if available) collected by Stein will be included with the print at no extra charge. The Society hopes to next add hundreds of Civil War portraits to the online image collection for further Wisconsin Historical Images-Wisconsin Genealogy Index ties.
The Stein Legacy
Simon and Julian Stein set out to provide the public with photographs of the highest quality, and ironically, through their work photographing such prominent and important people, they, too, became elevated to the level of those pictured, leaving behind their own historical footprints forever frozen in time.
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:: Posted March 2, 2009
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