On October 22, 1845, Benjamin Franklin Washington married Georgianna Hite Ransom in Jefferson County, Virginia, now part of West Virginia. A great-grandnephew of George Washington, Benjamin later became a newspaper editor in San Francisco. His granddaughter, Frances Washington Delehanty, would make her own place in American cultural history—as an artist, an illustrator, and the model for one of Gertrude Käsebier’s best-known photographs.
In the summer of 1899, Käsebier photographed Delehanty in a stable in Newport, Rhode Island. Titled The Manger, the image shows her enveloped in pale drapery, her face obscured by shadow. Although its title evokes the Nativity, the apparent infant in her lap is an illusion created by folded cloth. Käsebier used the setting to explore light, shade, and tone, producing an image whose soft textures exemplify the expressive ambitions of pictorialist photography.
The photograph won acclaim at the Philadelphia Salon in 1899 and later appeared in the first issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work in 1903. Decades afterward, Delehanty helped establish the Benedictine community of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. Founded in 1947 by Mother Benedict Duss and Mother Mary Aline Trilles de Warren, the community became an abbey in 1976. These episodes connect Delehanty with two distinct histories: the development of photography as a fine art and the establishment of a contemplative religious community.
Image: Frances Washington Delehanty models in a Newport, Rhode Island, stable for Gertrude Käsebier’s The Manger. The folds of cloth in her lap suggest an infant, though no baby was present. Delehanty, an artist and illustrator, later helped establish the community that became the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut.
