Cabinet Card Portrait of a Child, Identified as Captain David Dewey Hock, One Year Old

Richmond: Jefferson Fine Art Gallery, 1898. Albumen photograph measuring 5 ½ x 3 ⅞ on larger mount. Very good to near fine with light wear. Very Good. James Conway Farley was the first African-American photographer to gain fame in the United States, exhibiting at the Colored Industrial Fair in Richmond in 1884, where he won a first prize and the World Cotton Centennial in New Orleans in 1885. Born to enslaved parents in 1854, he moved with his mother to Richmond in 1861 and eventually found work at the studio of G.W. Davis. By 1879 Farley was the director of the studio, and his work was exhibited widely.

In 1895, Farley opened his own studio, the Jefferson Fine Art Gallery (also known as the Jefferson Art Gallery), on 523 East Broad St. in Richmond. He photographed prolifically during this period, his work appearing routinely in the Richmond Planet, where the one photograph of Farley himself that we know of appears, in a group shot of the directors of the Mechanics Savings Bank. Farley was quite active in civic life during this period, as a member of the Knights of Pithius, a board member of the Mechanics Savings Bank, and as a representative to the 1902 Virginia Baptist State Convention.

Offered here is a cabinet card portrait of child, identified on verso as 'Captain David Henry Hock, One Year Old." We find a David Dewey Hock in genealogical records who was born in 1898, and have assumed that this is the same individual and dated the photograph as being taken in 1898.

Few examples of Farley's work survive.