Ada Rehan, from the Actors and Actresses series (N171) for Gypsy Queen Cigarettes 1886 - 1890

Curator: Let’s turn our attention to this small but fascinating portrait, a trade card produced by Goodwin & Company sometime between 1886 and 1890. It depicts the actress Ada Rehan. Editor: Ah, it’s got that sepia-toned dreaminess of old photos. She’s gazing off somewhere, almost ethereal, leaning slightly on what looks like a heavily ornamented table with a candelabra on it. It makes me think of old theatres, velvet curtains, and whispered secrets. Curator: Indeed. These cards, part of the “Actors and Actresses” series, were actually marketing tools tucked into packs of Gypsy Queen Cigarettes. Consider the layers: a commodity object, cigarettes, advertising another commodity, celebrity. It reveals much about late 19th-century popular culture and the commercialization of fame. Editor: It's funny to think about celebrity then and now, and how ephemeral fame can be! I imagine people collected these like trading cards, images of their favorite stars packaged with something completely unrelated—cigarettes! I'd almost forgotten about objects such as tobacco cards; what happened to them? Curator: Many ended up in scrapbooks, tossed aside, or were destroyed. What survives offers clues to what images were in circulation at the time, whose likeness was prized, and which companies found value in that recognition. And of course the printing technology—photoengraving which helped democratize image production and dissemination—deserves consideration. Editor: It's that element of mass production juxtaposed with Ada's striking, albeit captured, presence in a still image that strikes me the most. To think she unknowingly sold who-knows-how-many cigarette packs by virtue of a celebrity portrait; quite an unexpected form of consumerist idolatry, if you ask me. Curator: Precisely. Thinking about those consumers, the laborers making cigarettes, the photographers capturing portraits like this of Ada Rehan, makes you reflect on this artifact as more than just a portrait but the manifestation of many industries meeting simultaneously. Editor: In retrospect, it reminds me to reflect on how intertwined our lives and arts, even seemingly delicate arts such as portrait photography, become in conjunction with industry.