Charles Darwin Carte de Visite Signed, With Likely Provenance of the Darwin Family

Our first Darwin signed photograph in all these years

Charles Darwin, English naturalist whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern biology and evolutionary studies. Darwin’s explanation for the great unfolding of life through time – evolution by natural selection – transformed our understanding of the living world, and focused attention on the cumulative inherited change in a population of organisms through time leading to the appearance of new forms: the process by which new species or populations of living things develop from preexisting forms through successive generations. Darwin revolutionized the understanding of the development of living things, as Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the physical universe.

An attractive Carte de Visite signed (“Ch. Darwin”), circa late 1870s, very good condition though with a few small adhesive tape marks. The photograph was taken by Elliott & Fry, 56 Baker Street, London, and has their front and back stamps. For a century after its founding in 1863, the firm’s core business was taking and publishing photographs of the Victorian public, and social, artistic, scientific and political luminaries. Among the notables known to have sat for a photograph by Elliott & Fry were Prime Minister William Gladstone, Alfred Lord Tennyson, W.S. Gilbert, Rudyard Kipling, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Florence Nightingale, and Charles Darwin.

In all our years in the field, we have seen just a handful of Darwin signed photographs, and have never ourselves had one. This is indeed a rarity. But the provenance is just as fascinating, as finding a signed Darwin photograph with provenance is perhaps unique.

William Bateson was a British biologist who founded and named the science of genetics and whose experiments provided evidence basic to the modern understanding of heredity. He was a dedicated evolutionist, and his early works on the mechanisms of biological evolution were strongly influenced by Charles Darwin, though he believed that Darwin’s theory of evolution required a firmer base in heredity. Bateson also became the foremost champion of Gregor Mendel’s work on genetics. Darwin died in 1882 when Bateson was at college, and though Bateson may have written Darwin, such letter is unknown. Bateson and his wife did, however, correspond with Darwin’s family in later years, as “Darwin Online” indicates.

This CDV comes with an autograph letter signed from Darwin’s granddaughter, Margaret Keynes, dated January 23, 1929, addressed to Sir George Buckston Browne, proposing an alternative date for her and her husband Dr. Geoffrey Keynes to come for lunch, expressing gladness that Browne wanted “the Bateson letter and the other things”, and acknowledging that he attended the same school as Dr. Keynes. Browne had bought Darwin’s old home, so lunch there would have been a homecoming of sorts for Margaret. Finding the CDV and letter together, we would conjecture that this CDV was the property – one of “the other things” – of Margaret that she mentioned in the letter that she was glad Browne wanted, and had descended in the family to her, along with the Bateson letter. Thus this CDV was apparently property of the Darwin family, the most important provenance imaginable.