Quinby & Co.

This is not a photograph of anything. It is the back of one — the printed mark Quinby & Co. stamped on its mounts, and the reason a great many Charleston portraits can still be attributed a hundred and sixty years later.

Charles Quinby was born at White Plains, New York, on February 29, 1832, and began as a daguerreotypist in New York City in the 1850s. In February 1857 he came to Charleston as successor to the Tyler & Co. gallery at 233 King Street. He had ambitions beyond one storefront: an advertisement that autumn described the firm as manufacturers and importers of photographic goods, with a factory at Waterbury, Connecticut and galleries in Charleston, Augusta and on Broadway. By 1861 the Quinby Photograph and Fine Art Gallery had moved to 261 King Street, in the middle of the business district.

Which is where Charleston went to be photographed in the spring of secession. In late March 1861 Mary Boykin Chesnut recorded a friend at her door: come with us to Quinby's, everybody will be there, to be photographed is the rage just now. She went, and hated the result — her likeness uglier than ever, she wrote; her husband's very good and hers like a washerwoman's.

Edmund Ruffin sat there too. He stayed in the city for some days after pulling the lanyard on the morning of April 12, and had his portrait made at Quinby's while he was at it.

A backmark is a small thing that does large work. It is often the only evidence of who made a surviving portrait, and for collectors it is frequently the difference between an identified image and an anonymous one.