Edmonia Lewis

This carte de visite (“visiting card”) photograph of sculptor Edmonia Lewis is part of a series studio photographer Henry Rocher took when Lewis was in Chicago for an 1870 exhibition of her work. Rocher’s portraits, which were often of actresses, emphasized romantic compositions and props. Lewis sits in a fringed chair wearing a suit-style dress, draped in a velvety blanket with a Greek meander-pattern border, sporting a fez-like hat. The overall effect is of a creative, unconventional artist. The ancient Greek meander pattern, popular in 19th-century Greek Revival decorative art, may allude to Lewis’s neoclassical sculptural style. Art historians theorize that Lewis, who was of African and Native American ancestry, sculpted figures from ancient Egypt as an allusion to African identity. The fez-style hat – strongly associated with the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, and later incorporated into Black nationalist self-representation – may represent a similar gesture.