Solomon Nunes Carvalho

Pioneering daguerreotypist, photographer, memoirist, portraitist, and communal figure, the life of Solomon Nunes Carvalho contained equal parts ambition and wanderlust.

Born in Charleston, Solomon was the eldest child of David Nunes Carvalho and Sarah D’Azevedo, both born in England to Sephardic families with mercantile ties throughout the Caribbean and North America. David Nunes Carvalho manufactured fine marbled paper and helped defend Charleston during the War of 1812. In 1829, the family moved north to Baltimore, though they maintained communal connections with Charleston, as well as in Philadelphia and Barbados.

It is unclear whether Carvalho had any formal art training. His earliest known paintings date from the 1830s, when he was in his early twenties and include a portrait of his friend and schoolmate David Camden DeLeon (later a distinguished army surgeon for both the United States and the C.S.A.), and the interior of the synagogue belonging to Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston that Carvalho painted from memory after the building had burned down in the great fire of 1838.

One of the principal legends about Carvalho, a story of selfless bravery, arose from an incident that took place around this period and is supported by statements in his obituary, published decades later in American Hebrew. Having taken a post working for one of his uncles, a merchant, , Carvalho found himself caught in a sea storm on a vessel carrying numerous passengers. When the vessel began to sink, Carvalho dove into the water, swam ashore, and set up a safety line, allowing his fellow passengers to make it to shore safely before the ship sank. According to the obituary, “All were cast ashore without money. It was here his knowledge of art came in good stead, and by drawing crayon portraits of people in the village where he was cast away he raised enough money to return to his home.”

At age thirty Solomon fell in love with Sarah Miriam da Silva Solis of New York.

They were married on October 15th of that year, and initially the young couple made Philadelphia, then the center of the arts in America, their home. Carvalho entered some of his work in the annual exhibition by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1849, and later, while living in Baltimore, was an active member of the Artists’ Association of Maryland, exhibiting a number of his paintings at the Maryland Historical Society. He also sojourned frequently in Charleston, where in 1852 he was awarded the silver medal for his painting “The Intercession of Moses for Israel” in a prize competition offered by the South Carolina Institute. Over the decades of his life, he would paint the portraits of many of the leading figures in American Jewry of his day, including Frances Tobias, Uriah Hendricks and, in 1861, a posthumous portrait of Judah Touro in New Orleans. While Carvalho continued painting oil portraits and miniatures throughout his life, by the late 1840s he had also begun experimenting with the new art of photography, and soon became skilled in the making of daguerreotypes.

Within a few years, Carvalho’s skill as a daguerreotypist would lead to the principle adventure of his life. In August 1853, Carvalho was approached by John C. Frémont, the celebrated explorer and army officer who had already led four expeditions across the Rockies. Frémont hired Carvalho to serve as the expedition photographer for his fifth and final westward voyage, as he sought to track a path that could serve as a route for the transcontinental railroad. With photography in its infancy as a medium, and little established experience by photographers at producing photographs in the field, many had significant doubts about Carvalho’s chances of successfully producing daguerreotypes in the Rockies under winter conditions. Although Carvalho proved his detractors wrong, images from the trip – all of his daguerrotypes and the majority of his drawings and paintings — were subsequently lost to posterity.

Carvalho’s journey proved to be much longer than either he or anyone else had planned. Serious difficulties beset the expedition party while attempting to cross the Rockies during the winter months. They soon found themselves isolated and on the verge of starvation crossing the High Plateaus in Utah Territory. By the time they were rescued by a group of Mormons, Carvalho had become so ill that he had to remain in Salt Lake City after the rest of the Frémont’s party left to resume the expedition. The respite was not a total loss, however; during the extended period of his recuperation, he painted the portrait of Mormon leader Brigham Young. When his health finally permitted, he resumed the trip alone, following the same route taken by Frémont’s party to California, taking pictures along the way, until he reached Los Angeles. Carvalho would then spend several months in the city, painting portraits of notable Californians, before returning home to his family.

Carvalho was deeply invested in questions of Jewish life and practice, and brought this sense of participation with him as he moved among the Jewish communities in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Charleston. In 1844, he was secretary for the organizational meeting of the first Jewish Sunday school in the West Indies, established for Congregation Nidhe Israel in Bridgetown, Barbados. He served on the Philadelphia Hebrew Education Society in 1850. In Baltimore, he worked with Samuel Etting to establish a short-lived Sephardic synagogue. In Charleston he became embroiled in the struggle over questions of reform that divided the Jewish community. Carvalho was very close to the American Rabbi Issac Leeser, whose portrait became one of the most famous of those he painted. He was a frequent contributor to Leeser’s newspaper, The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, which ran from 1843 through 1869 and was the earliest Jewish periodical ever published in the United States.

During his months in Los Angeles at the end of the Frémont expedition, he helped to found the Hebrew Benevolent Society there in 1854.

In 1856, following his return to Baltimore, Carvalho campaigned for Frémont, by then the presidential candidate for the new Republican Party. The following year saw the publication of his Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West, an account of his experiences with the Frémont expedition that provided Americans with a portrait of the lifestyle and practices of the Mormons, and other prose images of the developing West. It was frequently reprinted in its time and is still considered important for its documentation of life in the American West at the mid-nineteenth century.

In his later years, Carvalho would publish other shorter travel pieces. He continued to work as a photographer and painter, completing what is today his best known work, an allegorical painting entitled “Abraham Lincoln and Diogenes,” after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865. , although he supported his family largely through mechanical inventions and patents, including one for a steam-heating process. Carvalho died in New York in 1897, three years after the death of his wife Sarah.

Solomon Nunes Carvalho

1848