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Miss Kimberly, The American Actress & Shakspearian Reader.

Boston: B.W. Thayer & Co., [ca. 1852]. Tinted lithograph, 19.5” x 14.375” plus margins. CONDITION: Very good, .5” tear to right margin.

A scarce tinted lithograph of a successful antebellum actress from Connecticut who went on to practice medicine, operate a boardinghouse, and lead a woman-run insurance company.

This three-quarter-length portrait, after a daguerreotype by Southworth & Hawes, shows  the actress “Miss Kimberly” seated in a wooden chair, her right arm leaning on a small table and her left hand held expressively before her chest. She wears flowers in her hair, earrings, a simple cross necklace, multi-stranded pearl bracelets, and a fringe- and lace-trimmed floral-patterned dress with decorative cording. A facsimile of her signature appears at the lower-right edge of the portrait. A wood engraving by Samuel Worcester Rowse, evidently based on this portrait, was published in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion in June, 1852.

Miss Kimberly was the stage name of Sophia Elizabeth Roberts (née Munson), born in 1818 to Amos and Sophia Kimberly Roberts in North Haven, Connecticut. She was a successful  actress and dramatic reader during the 1850s and early 1860s, appearing in a wide variety of theatrical roles, reciting Shakespeare and Longfellow’s Hiawatha, and obtaining tangled rights, with her actor-husband George Roberts, to perform Dion Boucicault’s smash antebellum hit The Octoroon (a situation that ended in a protracted lawsuit). By 1871 she had evidently shifted course, advertising a lecture on “Educational and Industrial Pursuits of Women” in The New York Times. She practiced medicine after retiring from the stage, and by the late 1880s was established in New York City, “occupied in aiding in the control of the only insurance company in the world organized and conducted by women,—myself being the originator of the project. I also conduct a family hotel…My life has been passed in all-absorbing labor, mental and physical” (Munson, p. 963).

Born in Boston, businessman Benjamin W. Thayer (1814–1875) entered into partnership with his brother-in-law John Henry Bufford and John E. Moody in 1840 to buy out the pioneering Boston lithography firm of Pendleton & Co., with which Bufford had apprenticed, and which had been owned by Thomas Moore since 1836. Bufford worked as the primary artist and general manager of the new company, B. W. Thayer & Co., which was one of the first color lithographers in the U.S., producing work from several stones as early as 1843 or 1844. Thayer left the firm in 1845 to operate a fancy goods store on Washington Street, and the printing firm became J. H. Bufford & Co. In 1850 Thayer re-entered the partnership, and the following year re-occupied the old lithographic shop (Bufford having moved). Late in 1853, Thayer sold the shop to S. W. Chandler & Co. and became a successful real estate broker and newspaper-owner, though he remained in contact with the lithography business through his brother-in-law. Thayer & Co. “was the first Boston firm to take up color lithography in competition with William Sharp. In 1840 they began printing sheet music illustrations on tinted backgrounds,” as they have done here (Pierce and Slautterback, p. 156). While mostly printing sheet music covers, the firm also produced theatrical posters and city and landscape views.

OCLC records just two holdings, at the AAS and the Boston Athenaeum. We locate just one other, at the Smithsonian. A later edition, published by Thayer’s successors, S. W. Chandler & Co., is held at the Boston Athenaeum as well.

REFERENCES: Pierce, Sally and Catharina Slautterback. Boston Lithography 1825–1880 (Boston, 1991), pp. 155–56; Peters, America on Stone, p. 382–83; “Miscellaneous,” The New York Times, March 14, 1871; Munson, Myron A. The Munson Record, Vol. II (New Haven, CT, 1895).

Item #9401

Price: $950.00

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