A rarely seen trio of H. Marshall Gardiner's (1884-1942) Nantucket Phostint process panoramas, Nantucket From Monomoy Shore, Nantucket Island, Mass. Foot Pond in Saul's Hills and Nantucket Island, Mass. Moorlands and Polpis Harbor, these color photo prints are remarkable for the natural color palette and clarity of photographic image produced by the Detroit Publishing Company's proprietary Phostint process. This unique series of Nantucket panorama Phostint prints have both a photographic verisimilitude and a painterly use of color. From 1910 to 1942, H. Marshall Gardiner lived on Nantucket. 1/ He knew the landscape well. His interests included the architecture of Nantucket, its seafaring traditions and the island landscape. Some of Gardiner's color photographs also celebrated daily life. He is the son of a 19th c. professional photographer and the aesthetics of his use of Kodak's first film released in 1910 can be seen as carrying forward elements of the control 19th c. photographers had in the plate development process and hand coloring. 2/
From his shop, Gardiner sold hand colored photograph prints, studio work and his hand colored or oil paint finished post cards. Marshall's color photography was painterly, and his Phostint post cards present Nantucket Island landscapes in different seasonal colors. 3/ These three uniquely large panorama prints are a separate category from the post cards, and the only panorama series Marshall produced. The three unique Nantucket panorama images capture the blue hues of Nantucket Harbor's summer waters, its tall green salt grass, and elsewhere meadows enlivened by the wildflowers in bloom near the ponds and upon the Commons.
Gardiner's three panoramas of Nantucket are also botanical records of early 20th c. Nantucket's vividly colored wildflowers, heath, ponds and pond shore uplands to a botanist's delight. Likely many of these native Nantucket flowers are extinct due to the invasive human species on these enchanting and delicate landscapes. 4/ In fact, the panorama Nantucket from Monomoy Shore is about the sky, the sea and the verdant salt grasses that together frame a distant Nantucket town. The other two panoramas show only Nantucket Island's natural landscape, as if it were uninhabited.
Notes:
1. please see H. Marshall Gardiner's Nantucket Post Cards 1910-1940, Meridian Printing, Rhode Island, 1995, by his daughter, Geraldine Gardiner Salisbury for a comprehensive biography of H. Gardiner Marshall on Nantucket, with description also of his father W. H. Gardiner, a photographer who created hand colored photographs in Michigan and Florida. The book is extensively illustrated but while it alludes to the three panoramas as the unique exceptions to Gardiner's post cards, the book does not include images or descriptive notes about the panoramas.
2. As an agent of Eastman Kodak on Nantucket Island, Marshall also did Kodak photo film processing at his shop. Kodak has a timeline on its web site and 1910 is the year Kodak introduced its first acetate safety film. History of Film | Kodak
3. The patented Detroit Publishing Company Phostint process was never reproduced after the company closed during the Great Depression of 1929. That helps date Marshall's Phostint prints from between 1910 and 1929. As he began working immediately upon his arrival in Nantucket, 1910. The Catalog of Copyright Entries shows 1911, 1914 and a 1918 entry for H. Marshall Gardiner of Nantucket landscape photographs. I have not located other records.
4. Nantucket Wild Flowers by Alice O. Albertson, Curator of the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association. G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, The Knickerbocker Press, 1921, reprinted 1973 by Theophrastus, Little Compton, Rhode Island