Hand painted photographs: 1840s to 1940s: Since photography’s beginnings, practitioners have sought ways to add color to their photos and for the first 100 years, this required tinting the photos by hand. This collection provides a range of examples from this period, from daguerreotypes to silver-gelatin, and focuses on two formats: enlarged, hand-painted tintypes from the late 19th century and oval “chalk photos” from the early 20th. The widespread popularity of these formats largely took over the role of folk- art painting, while making portraiture widely available across class and racial lines. Rather than being limited only to those wealthy enough to commission a painting, now anyone could have and display a portrait of themselves or their famly.