Beatrice Tonnesen – Photographer & Artist

In previous articles and Slideshow Albums 1 and 2 (“Introduction” and “Artwork Bearing Signatures and Attributions…”), I reported that many art prints produced between 1900 and the 1930′s began as photos created in the Chicago studio of Beatrice Tonnesen. Relatively few of these prints were signed by Tonnesen, but many unsigned examples of her work [...]

BT’s hearing impairment was probably instrumental in her choice of photography as a career. However, later in life, after leaving photography and Chicago for life back in Winneconne, Wisconsin, she became a dealer for the then state-of-the-art hearing aid, the Lieber Oscillator, made by Sonotone Corporation.

This image provided courtesy of the Oshkosh Public Museum shows the original photo taken by Beatrice Tonnesen, and then utilized for the painted image shown in the following Zoomed image.

Zoomify is a feature of the new Adobe Photoshop CS3 that allows zooming and panning. It automatically publishes an entire suite of HTML, XML, JPGs and Flash files. In this case, more than a hundred [...]

“Two Women Picture-Makers: They Represented American Women in Artistic Photography at Paris The work of American women in artistic photography has been represented at Paris by two delegates, both of whom are ably fitted by reason of talent and artistic achievement, to speak for the feminine exponents of the profession.  Miss Beatrice Tonnesen read a [...]

At the website Seven Roads, I found the trade label for Osgood & Co., one of the original purchasers of at least some of the Beatrice Tonnesen images. I have found this copyright on a couple of the newspaper inserts. A Google search provided no additional information on the company. Not a particularly creative label, [...]

(This is the second in a series of articles on the works of Beatrice Tonnesen. The first appears below under the heading “Introduction.”) Beatrice Tonnesen has not generally been recognized as a major contributor to the so-called “Golden Age of Illustration,” that period in America from about 1900-1940, when calendar art was intensely popular. Artists [...]