page_title: Frederick August Wenderoth
section_title: Photographer and miniaturist
hierarchical_section_title: Frederick August Wenderoth / Photographer and miniaturist
context_page_description: Frederick August Wenderoth or F. A. Wenderoth was a German-born American painter and photographer. Born and educated in Cassel, where he first learned to paint from his father, he established a lifelong friendship with Charles Christian Nahl at school. During a period of political upheaval he left Germany for Paris where his was joined by Nahl and his half-brother Hugo Wilhelm Arthur Nahl.They then moved to the US, living first in New York, before traveling by sea to California to join the Gold Rush.
  Unsuccessful as miners, Wenderoth and Nahl opened art studios, first in Sacramento and later in San Francisco, collaborating as painters, engravers and photographers. After a trip to South Seas and Australia, Wenderoth married and moved to Philadelphia, where he established a photography studio. In the late 1850s he worked for a period in South Carolina, going into partnership with Jesse Bolles. There, and later when he returned to Philadelphia, he innovated a number of photographic techniques, such as the ivory-type and photozincography. Wenderoth died in 1884 of tuberculosis.
context_section_description: When the Great Fire of Sacramento destroyed the city, their work was burned, and they returned to San Francisco. They established a studio there and quickly gained a reputation. In 1853, Alonzo Delano commissioned illustrations for his Pen Knife Sketches from Wenderoth and Nahl, and a year later they were advertising themselves as daguerreotypists. Additionally Wenderoth worked on miniature portraits at this time, most likely from daguerreotypes images. These were painted on "wafer-thin ivory" in watercolors, such as his 1854 Portrait of a Man.
  Between 1852 and 1853, Wenderoth traveled to the South Seas and on to Australia. On his return, in 1856 he married Nahl's half-sister, Laura. The newly married couple returned to Philadelphia where they meant to settle. However, shortly afterward Laura died during childbirth, along with her infant.
  In 1857 Wenderoth was living in Charleston, South Carolina, where he went into business with Jesse H. Bolles for about a year. During this period he seems to have perfected color stereoscopic ambrotypes and ivory types. Ivory types consist of placing a photograph and a painting "of the same subject over each other into a kind of sandwich that is then sealed together with beeswax."
  In 1858 he returned to Philadelphia. There Wenderoth worked for Harper's Weekly, producing illustrations and photographs, and established a business on Chestnut Street, with partner William Curtis Taylor. They were joined by John Henry Brown, a well-known miniaturist. The firm specialized in coloring photographs, which, though growing in popularity, were considered inferior because of the lack of color. Wenderoth and his colleagues created photographic colorization techniques called "Ivorytypes", "Opalotypes" and the "New Crayon" in which color washes made a photographic portrait appear more like a painting, and thus more marketable.
  In 1884 Wenderoth died in Philadelphia of tuberculosis.
caption: Portrait of a Man (1854), a portrait miniature, is painted on ivory with watercolors.
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