John Quincy Adams and National Portraiture

Between 1842 and his death in 1848, elderly former president and sitting congressman John Quincy Adams sat for upward of fifty daguerreotypes. This chapter examines Adams’s diary entries in which he wrote about his experiences with the new medium. Adams’s writings reveal a thoughtful, anxious public figure grappling with the question of what photography’s capacity to produce images “too true to the original” might mean for the era’s visual politics. While Adams recognized photography’s unique representational power, he had serious concerns about whether the daguerreotype, with its twin investments in fidelity and wonder, was the best art for producing portraits, in his words, “worthy of being preserved” as images of and for the nation.