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Timed Landscapes

John Hanson Mitchell

The haunting images of the nineteenth century New England landscape that appear on the following pages were probably taken by a black man named Robert A. Gilbert, who was born in Natural Bridge, Virginia in 1869.

Over twenty-five years ago, I found the unsigned glass plate negatives from which the prints were made stored away in the attic of an old estate owned by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, in Lincoln. No one knew much about the plates except that they had been owned by William Brewster, a well-known ornithologist who was active around the turn of the last century and served as the first president of the society, which was founded in 1896. It was presumed that Brewster was the photographer. But from reading over letters and notebooks I also discovered, I subsequently came to believe that the images were in fact the work of Brewster's valet, a man noted in various documents of the period simply as "Gilbert".

My theory is that Brewster, the white man, taught Gilbert to develop and print the plates, and then Gilbert, being Gilbert, taught himself to take his own photographs in the field. Even if he didn't actually expose the plates in the field, I later learned that the art of nineteenth century photography was actually in the development and printing and that he should have been given credit. Some of the renowned Civil War photographers, for example, did not actually shoot many of their most famous photographs but were the printers and developers of images taken by their assistants.

For nearly twenty years Gilbert worked with Brewster at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he served as a sort of jack of all trades. Some time around 1915 he developed a shoe polish formula and later took it abroad to Stockholm, where he made a fortune. He later lost his money and ended up in Paris, where he fell in with the expatriate black community and even had a little mix up with F Scott Fitzgerald. Among other adventurers, he has a walk-on part in Tender is the Night, as the character Jules Petersen.

I think Brewster may have helped Gilbert all along the way and may have even footed the bill for some of his ventures, including the European sojourn. When Gilbert came back to the U.S., he began working as assistant to the curator at the museum at Harvard and stayed on at the museum after Brewster's death in 1919. He remained there until his own death in 1942.

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