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Boston Base Ball Club. 1888.
Boston: Published by Hastings the Photographer, 147 Tremont Street, 1888. Photolithograph, 10.75” x 16.25” plus margins. CONDITION: Good, small losses to image near second base and right field; area of surface loss to figures seated on the ground at far left. A rare photolithograph of a photomontage showing the “Boston Beaneaters” at their opening game of the 1888 season against the Philadelphians. Portraying the Boston Base Ball Club with their managers and other spectators watching from the grandstand, this photomontage provides a who’s who of the team during their first home game at the newly erected Second South End Grounds on May 25th, 1888. In an effort to give the print a high degree of realism and specificity, photographer and publisher G. H. Hastings superimposed the photographed faces of management and players onto the figures in the composition, then had it printed in the form of this photolithograph. On the pitcher’s mound is John Clarkson, who had recently been acquired for $10,000 from the Chicago White Stockings, while catcher Michael Joseph “King” Kelly, also acquired from the White Stockings for $10,000 in 1888 (together they became known as the “$20,000 Battery”), crouches at the ready. Covering first is the Beaneaters’ manager “Honest John” Morrill, while second is held by John “Black Jack” Burdock, and third baseman Ezra Sutton stands fast. Out at left field is Joseph Hornung (among the greatest fielders of the nineteenth century), while center is played by Dick Johnston, and right is held ably by Tom Brown. Shortstop Irv Ray rounds out the team. An article concerning this print in the Boston Globe reports that in the grandstand are “the faces of such well-known persons as George Wright, Mr. Rand of Rand, Avery, & Co, Nat Goodwin, George Floyd…[and] Mr. Ditson of Wright & Ditson.” George Wright (1847–1937) was a pioneering promoter of American baseball, having formed the first professional baseball league, “The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players,” in Boston in 1871; Mr. Rand was likely the son of George Curtis Rand, founder of the printing house Rand, Avery & Company, who had died a decade earlier; Nat Goodwin and George Floyd together had arranged for the Beaneaters’ acquisition of King Kelly, with Floyd serving as Kelly’s agent for most of his career; and Mr. Ditson was businessman Henry Ditson, who, along with baseball hall-of-famer George Wright, had co-founded the seminal sporting goods company, Wright and Ditson. According to statistics compiled by the Society for American Baseball Research, this was a spectacularly popular game, boasting some 15,000 spectators in attendance. Unfortunately for local supporters, the Beaneaters lost the game, scoring only one run against the four scored by the Philadelphians. The Boston Base Ball Club, officially known as the Boston Base Ball Association, and occasionally Boston Nationals, was founded around 1883. The team was known throughout the twentieth century by the nickname, the Boston Beaneaters, “which refers to Boston's nickname of ‘Beantown,’ derived from the supposed culinary preferences of some of its immigrant inhabitants, [but] was never an official one…The 1883 season saw the newly dubbed Beaneaters win their seventh pennant, and third in the NL under the leadership of Jack Burdock and John Morrill…The team would not win another pennant the rest of the decade, but was in heavy close contention for the pennant in 1884, 1889 and early contention in 1887 and 1888” (Bullpen). They played on South End Grounds I from 1882 until it burned down in 1887, then on the high-capacity South End Grounds II, a double-deck park, from 1887 to 1894, and finally on the much smaller South End Parks III from 1894 to 1906. Born in Massachusetts in 1850, photographer G. H. Hastings co-operated a studio, Ritz & Hastings, from the mid 1860s–1880s. Sometime in the 1880s, he founded his own photographic studio, based in Tremont Street in Boston, and later in 1891 opened a branch on Bath Road in Newport, Rhode Island. After splitting from Ritz, Hastings “immediately began building his business, securing Dartmouth College as a client in 1885. He also began group portraits of Boston baseball teams and players, the genre by which he is best known among…collectors of photographica. By 1891 he had been elected President of the Photographers’ Association of America, in 1897 the president of the Photographers’ Club of New England, and when this organization evolved into the Photographers’ Association of New England, he became perpetual secretary. In 1919 he assumed control of the Chickering Studio. Though active as a camera artist in the 1880s and ‘90s, his duties became largely administrative after the turn of the 20th century” (“Studio”). Attesting to the popularity of this image, an article appearing in the Boston Globe from May 20th, 1888, reports that “Mr. Hastings’ large and artistic photograph of the base ball club in the window of J.W. Parker’s, 515 Washington street, is attracting much attention and admiration.” The “photograph” exhibited at Parker’s was probably the original reproduced in the print offered here. REFERENCES: Bullpen, BR. “Boston Beaneaters,” “South End Grounds,” and “1888 Boston Schedule” at Baseball Reference online; “Picturing of the Bostons,” The Boston Globe, May 12, 1888; “Table Gossip,” The Boston Globe, May 20, 1888; “Studio, Ritz and Hastings,” at Broadway Photographs online.
Item #8267
Price: $2,750.00
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