Set of four Nantucket photos, including a museum interior, sharks on the beach, Brant Point Light, and Nantucket Harbor.

Nantucket, [c. 1880s.]. Four albumen prints (4” x 7” to 4.5” x 7.5”), mounted on two sheets of paperboard (each 13.8” x 10.85”). CONDITION: Very good, light foxing and wear to edges of mounts.

Four striking photos of the Nantucket scene in the early 1880s.

These evocative photos show “Nantucket Harbor,” with the steamer Monohansett in the background and catboats in the foreground; “Brant Point Light,” with the town behind it; two men and a woman posed on the beach with four dead sharks from their day’s “Sharking” (a popular island sport of the day, not to mention necessary for procuring shark liver oil); and a rich interior view of the “Museum Nantucket,” the Nantucket Atheneum. Extending into the foreground of this image is an enormous sperm whale jaw, probably the eighteen-foot specimen originally taken from an eighty-foot bull whale in the Pacific and brought to Nantucket in 1865 by Captain William Cash. The next year, P. T. Barnum tried to procure the jaw for his own “American Museum,” but Cash sold it to the Atheneum instead, in 1871.

Two of the photos have been identified by the Nantucket Historical Association as the work of Henry Sherman Wyer (1847–1920), and a vignette of the third appears in Wyer’s Nantucket: Old and New (1895). Wyer had a studio in Yonkers, New York, but was active in Nantucket for much of his life. He published many early postcards of the island and was involved in the Nantucket Historical Society.