Bradley & Rulofson's Celebrities

San Francisco: Bradley & Rulofson, 1876. First Edition. Good. Cabinet card; 4 x 6 1/4; printed key to verso; small nick to lower left corner and a vertical crease through middle; a few minor spots to verso; in good to very good condition.Quite-scarce, early form of photographic art, the so called 'cartes mosaique' was created by Bradley & Rulofson of San Francisco. The studio, which would become known for capturing the images of hundreds of celebrities and notable Californians, was founded by Henry William Bradley (1813-1891) in 1850, after he would immigrate to California from North Carolina during the Gold Rush and later would be joined by William Herman Rulofson (1826-1878), who would also come to California from Canada as a prospector. The process of their 'cartes mosaiques' - an early predecessor of the photomontage as an art form - was based on French photographer Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi's (1819 - 1889) 'carte-de-visite mosaique,' which the latter had patented in 1863. Much more elaborate and involved than Disderi's, the Bradley & Rulofson cabinet cards consisted of numerous images of single persons, which had been photographed separately and then cut out and arranged around each other, often partially overlapping, thus allowing customers to own many portraits of celebrities at once. The current card included 110 of these celebrities, identified in the key on verso. The latter also included testimonies and opinions of Bradley & Rulofson's art.