[John Maize Wright]
Unknown
Person in photograph John Maize Wright American
Not on view
With striking features, clinched hands, an impressive mane, and piercing gaze, John Maize Wright (1787 – 1855), seems to command into existence the very photograph in which he is captured, as if to say, with a strike of his cane: “let there be light!” A farmer in Kentucky and Tennessee (where this daguerreotype was likely made), Wright is the forefather of the artist Jimmy Wright, whose pastel self-portrait (2001.429) makes a poignant pendant to this photograph. Whereas John Wright seems to materialize in the light reflected from the silver surface of the daguerreotype, Jimmy Wright illuminates his own features with an eerie blue-green aura, the clenched hand supporting his face a distant echo of the self-assured gesture of his distant ancestor.
