Figure 1.--This Civil War Era CDV portrait shows an unidentified boy wearing wht looks like smock with a bow. and white collar. Note the toy buggy on the table next to him. The draped table was a Daguereotype standard. (this could b a CDV copy of a Dag. We are not entirely sure what the garment would have been called at the time. It also looks like a tunic. It would be so nice to recreate for a Civil War Era reenactment. The boy looks to be about 6 years old. The studio was Moore Bros. Springfield, Massachsettes.

We have no information on American boys wearing smocks in the mid-19th century. Nor have we found many images showung boys wearing smocks. And by the 1860s with the CDV, the number of available images are substantial. Our information on Eurpoe is also limited during this period. European farm workers commonly wore smocks during this period, but as farv as we not American farm workers or factory workers, at least as far as wecan tell. Information on the populatity of smocks for children is lacking at this time. This may be due to the lack of images of children in play clothes, which is how smocks were viewed. Virtually all Dags, Ambros, tin-types, and CDVs were were portraits taken in the studios. The same is largely true of paintings as well, but there were genre artists producing images of people outside the studio in everyday clothes. And we note a Curier & Ives print of children playing in 1862. One of the boys wears a smock. When a portrait was painted or taken in a photographic studio, a child would have been dressed in his best suit and not worn a smock. We do note quite a large number of boys wearing tunics, in some way a related garment. In fact, we are not entirely sure in some cases if boys are wearing tunics or smocks. The examples we have found are front-buttoning and are not very common.

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Created: 1:50 AM 4/15/2013
Last updated: 10:30 PM 10/30/2019