Fine profile bust-length studio quarter plate gelatin-silver positive on glass plate portrait of Marcus Reno. N.p., ca 1880s. Gilt leather case featuring a Federal Eagle, gilt-lettered "Marcus A. Reno."

A historic portrait of Marcus Albert Reno (1834-1889), a career military officer who served in the Civil War and later under George Armstrong Custer in the Great Sioux War. Reno is most noted for his role in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where he infamously did not support Custer's position on the battlefield, remaining instead in a defensive formation several miles away. Reno’s judgment during that fight has since been a subject of controversy. Although he was found blameless by a military tribunal and he tried for decades to clear his name from any suggestion of cowardice or insubordination, he slid into alcoholism and eventually died at just 54 years old.

Reno’s portrait features an older Reno in side profile. A very rare and unusual medium, the portrait is a gelatin-silver positive on a glass plate support finished to the back with aluminum powder with a gelatin binder. The effect is to give it a silvered, reflective quality, not dissimilar to a daguerreotype. Housed in a custom leather case with decorative emerald velvet mats, similar to cased images of an earlier generation. George S. Whiteley IV, who identified the medium with collaboration with Mark Osterman (retired Photographic Process Historian at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography), notes that the method is "virtually the same process as an orotone," only with aluminum rather than bronze powder. Orotones were introduced in the late 1880s which also corresponds with Reno's age in this portrait. (Whiteley's report was published when the image previously sold at Poulin Antiques & Auctions, Premier Firearms Auction, 23 May 2021, Lot 302). The portrait is incredibly sharp and a rare specimen in photographic history.

Reno’s Civil War record is one of bravery- he participated in the Battles of Kelly's Ford (WIA), the Gettysburg Campaign, Cold Harbor, Trevilian Station, and Cedar Creek, and was twice brevetted for gallant and meritorious conduct. His subsequent record, once tarnished in the wake of one of the most ignominious military defeats in American history, has been mostly restored. Indeed, in the 1960s, Reno’s descendants successfully lobbied the government to reinter his remains at Custer National Cemetery, where he remains the highest ranking officer to be buried there.

[Civil War, Union, Confederate, Western Americana, Western Expansion, Late Indian Wars, Great Sioux Wars, Apache Wars, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, George Armstrong Custer, Custer's Last Stand, Little Big Horn, Historic Photography, Early Photography, Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, Tintypes, Hard Images, Cased Images, Union Cases]