The Intimate Male Portraits from Herbert Mitchell’s Collection

In 2008, the Metropolitan Museum of Art received an extraordinary bequest from Columbia University librarian Herbert Mitchell, a lifelong collector of historical ephemera. Upon his death, Mitchell left behind a vast and eclectic archive, amassed not for scholarly acclaim but from a deep personal fascination with forgotten traces of the everyday past. His collection ranged from trade catalogues detailing wallpapers and plumbing fixtures to obscure visual artefacts such as occupational tintypes and rare photographic formats like daguerreotypes and ambrotypes.

It was within these 19th-century photographic formats that one of the most quietly evocative components of Mitchell’s collection was discovered—an assortment of portraits depicting men in remarkably intimate poses. These photographs, now housed in the Met’s collections, show pairs of men seated with legs draped over one another, holding hands, arms wrapped around shoulders, and even nestled into each other’s laps. Far removed from the typically stoic and formal postures associated with the photographic conventions of the era, these images reveal a tender physical familiarity that appears unguarded and natural.

What makes these portraits particularly intriguing is their silence. None are labelled. There are no names, dates, or locations. No written context exists to explain who the sitters were or what their relationships might have been. This absence invites speculation—were they brothers? Friends? Lovers? Colleagues? The ambiguity preserves their mystery while opening a window onto a less rigidly codified view of masculinity in the 19th century than is often assumed.

Photography in the Victorian era was a time-consuming, expensive, and deliberate affair. The fact that these men chose to pose in such closeness suggests not only affection but intention. Some historians of photography and queer history argue that such images reflect a period when same-sex intimacy, though often circumscribed by social norms, could be expressed with more physicality than would be permissible just a few decades later. Others see the photographs as reflecting homosocial bonds typical of the period, formed in all-male environments like military camps, boarding schools, or rural towns.

Mitchell’s curatorial instincts led him to preserve what others may have discarded, and in doing so, he helped to protect a visual record of emotional and physical tenderness between men at a time when such expressions would later be largely suppressed or coded. In an era that often seeks clearer lines of identification, these photographs remain open-ended—a rare glimpse into the private moments of lives now long past, where the body language says more than any caption ever could.

Herbert Mitchell may not have left us answers, but he gave us something arguably more valuable: the opportunity to reflect on how connection and intimacy were once publicly recorded, and how much of that quiet humanity remains visible in the stillness of a photograph.

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