Card Number 537, Grace Sherwood, from the Actors and Actresses series (N145-7) issued by Duke Sons & Co. to promote Duke Cigarettes 1880s

Curator: Let's turn our attention to this intriguing piece from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is "Card Number 537, Grace Sherwood, from the Actors and Actresses series (N145-7)" issued by Duke Sons & Co. It's dated to the 1880s and was originally a promotional item for Duke Cigarettes. The card combines drawing, print, and photography – specifically, an albumen print, a popular photographic process at the time. Editor: What strikes me immediately is the almost dreamy, sepia-toned quality. It’s a portrait, yet it feels so candid. She almost looks like a figure emerging from a forgotten memory. The light is soft, almost angelic, playing on her delicate features. Curator: Absolutely. And what is compelling is thinking about it in its original context: it was designed for mass consumption, part of a larger series featuring actors and actresses intended to boost sales for a tobacco company. It is interesting to consider these portrait cards less as independent aesthetic objects and more as part of a larger system of labor, materials and marketing. Editor: The text crammed at the bottom "Duke Cigarettes are the Best" shatters the illusion somehow and really drags you back to its consumerist purpose. And the texture, the tangible cardstock. You can imagine someone holding it, trading it. Curator: Yes! Think about the materials - paper, ink, photographic emulsion. How these are all commodified and turned into representations for selling cigarettes. Then think of the social context of collecting; how that collecting further fuels consumer desire. The intersection of commercial imagery, entertainment, and personal collecting becomes very apparent. Editor: I can almost smell the faint, lingering scent of tobacco clinging to it even now. It's like holding a fragment of someone else's dream. Curator: These images provided a window onto celebrity culture, a means of aspiring to and emulating figures presented as ideal types, further embedding those norms within the populace through manufactured desire and availability. Editor: Seeing her framed in such a way does remind me of that feeling...like stepping back into someone's wistful recollection. Curator: It brings into focus how commodities and the pursuit of aspiration influence our perceptions and the role images like this one played.