Albert and Toni Roothbert: 

Art, Photos and Philanthropy

Among the most generous — and locally least-known — Ridgefielders of the 20th Century were Albert and Toni Roothbert, a modern art collector and a leading fashion photographer, who lived at Topstone Farm on Topstone Road for many years.

Together they aided many organizations and causes, and established a fund that has provided fellowships to more than 1,000 talented college students over a half century after their deaths.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1874, Albert Roothbert came to the United States in 1902 and soon became a partner in a Wall Street investment firm. In 1925, at the age of 50, he retired and began studying and collecting modern and Oriental art. With the noted Mexican painter Miguel Covarrubias, he studied the art of Bali, and traveled from Paris to Peking in search of fine examples of modern European and Oriental art. (Some of the works he owned were later donated to major collections, such as at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

He also began looking for ways to improve society, an effort that eventually led him and his future wife to found the Roothbert Fund.

Baroness Antonie “Toni” von Horn was born to a prominent family in Germany in 1899. Around 1920, she opened a photography studio in Heidelberg. While in New York on an assignment, she met Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair (and a founder and the first secretary of the Museum of Modern Art), After seeing her photos, Crowninshield recommended she pursue a career in New York. 

She followed his advice and soon became a leading fashion and advertising photographer in the 1920s and 30s, working for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar and at her own studio. She became one of the first woman photographers to gain a national and international reputation in the field, and did many celebrity portraits, including Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ginger Rogers, Cole Porter, Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, and Jean Harlow. Her photograph of Albert Einstein has been called the best ever made of him. 

“She was one of the first women to operate in this field at the level of Edward Steichen, Adolf de Meyer and George Hoyningen-Heune, among others, and the only one to operate as an equal in direct competition with them,” said Charles van Horne, her great-nephew who serves as treasurer of The Roothbert Fund.

Unfortunately, she has not gotten much recognition as a pioneering woman in her field. Van Horne attributes that in part to the fact many people thought “Toni von Horn” was a man — she  sometimes actually signed her work Tony von Horn or just von Horn. What’s more, few originals of her work exist because “her plates and negatives lay in damp storage in an outbuilding at Topstone Farm and were discarded after she passed away, probably without a thought.”

Albert and Toni met in New York City and married in 1937. She closed her studio “and never took another picture,” The New York Times reported years later. 

In 1958, the Roothberts established the Roothbert Fund to aid “students motivated by spiritual values, who can satisfy high scholastic requirements and are considering teaching as a vocation.” 

According to the fund, “The Roothberts shared a devotion to young people, whose idealism, they believed, was the best defense against a recurrence of the tragedies of the first half of the 20th Century.”

Recipients are called Roothbert Fellows; more than 1,000 young men and women have received the fellowships. They have included black students expelled from Southern University in 1960 for their pioneering lunch-counter integration in Baton Rouge;  the first graduates of Harlem Preparatory School;  and top-ranking Yale graduates. 

The fund also has awarded grants for special projects, including training in family counseling in a poor neighborhood of Manhattan; funding a van helping street people in the  South Bronx; support for a program for inmates at a Pennsylvania prison involving mental health, poetry, and leadership; establishing an interfaith institute for clergywomen in rural Massachusetts;  a project on peace-making in Jerusalem;  and creating a library for the college-bound program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for women in nearby Westchester County.

Toni was also interested in the mentally handicapped. She had bought a 216-acre farm in Copake, N.Y.,  planning to convert it to an organic operation. Instead she wound up turning the farm over to Camphill, a program for adults with special needs. She also helped to secure Albert Schweitzer’s assistance for Camphill.

Albert Roothbert died here in 1965 at the age of 90. In his will he left money to create a Ridgefield High School scholarship fund as well as a sizable grant to the Ridgefield Library. Toni died here in 1970 at 71.

In later life at Topstone Farm, Toni Roothbert was an organic gardener and  conservationist, as well as a humanitarian. She was  interested in a variety of spiritual movements, including Buddhism and  Quakerism. She was inspired by and a friend of Albert Schweitzer, the multifaceted physician, philosopher,  and organist whose humanitarian work at Lambarene Mission in Africa she supported for years — she would annually supply Schweitzer with seeds for his vegetable garden.

When Schweitzer died in 1965, she wrote to one of  his friends in Switzerland: “Since my girlhood in war-torn Europe, I have been looking to Albert Schweitzer as a guiding light and in times of sorrow and stress, my thoughts and love turned always to him…

“Compassion drove the young philosopher-musician to the dark continent and here he administered medicine to the sick, but his greater gift has been to all mankind: The opening of the heart in love to all creation, the reverence for life to all creatures. He became an apostle of goodwill, the challenger to us all. He is the conscience of Man today. Though his strong heart has stopped beating, his light will shine and the world needs this light.”

And, she told The Ridgefield Press that week, “The ethic he stands for is certainly a precious challenge to human beings in today’s cruel and crucified world.”

Charles Sheeler, 

Precise Painter

One of the leading American painters of the 20th Century lived and worked in a historic Ridgefield building that, like too many other relics of the town’s past, has disappeared.

The Whipstick District schoolhouse stood on the northern corner of Whipstick and Nod Roads. After it closed in 1915, the small building was incorporated into a wing of stucco-covered house. There, American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler lived and worked for 10 years. 

As a painter Sheeler was famous for his “precisionist” style. He was also well known and

respected as a photographer, who was hired by Henry Ford to photograph his factories, and worked many years for such Conde Nast publications as Vogue.

Born in 1883 in Philadelphia, Charles Rettrew Sheeler Jr. studied art with William Merritt Chase, a noted American Impressionist, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and then went off to Europe to study both modern and classical painting. 

Back in Philadelphia, using a Kodak Brownie that cost $5, he taught himself photography. To help his income, he became a freelance commercial photographer. That medium influenced his art, and his paintings began to take on the precision of a photograph. His work for Ford also influenced him, and he became best known as painter of machines and industrial scenes as well as commercial ships. 

Throughout his life, Sheeler continued to both photograph and paint America and Americana, and he was widely considered a master at both media.

“Photography is nature seen from the eyes outward, painting from the eyes inward,” he said in a 1938 interview. 

Several of his paintings use views of the inside or outside of his Ridgefield home, including   “Newhaven” and “An Artist Looks at Nature,” The latter is a 1943 surreal painting in which he incorporates a self-portrait photograph of himself (probably taken in Ridgefield), his house in Ridgefield, and the Hoover Dam, which he had photographed in 1939 while he lived here.  

His work is in many of the major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Sheeler moved to the Whipstick house in 1932. He wife, Katherine, died a year later. He lived

alone for nine years but socialized often with friends, including the poet William Carlos Williams and photographer Edward Steichen, who lived in nearby Redding.

In 1942, Sheeler married Musya Sokolova, a Russian dancer and photographer, and the couple soon moved to Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y. He died there in 1965. 

In 2013, Sheeler became the seventh Ridgefielder to be commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp. The issue, part of a sheet on “Modern Art in America,” shows his famous 1930 painting, “American Landscape.”

Unfortunately, the schoolhouse-home where he painted and which he used in some of his paintings, was demolished in 2000 to make way for a much larger house.  

Marie H. Kendall: 

Early Woman Photographer

Ridgefield was blessed to have Joseph Hartmann photographing its people and places from the 1890s into the 1930s. But even before Hartmann turned his camera’s eye on Ridgefield, a remarkable woman began recording “glimpses” of the community — from streetscapes to house portraits to farmers plowing their fields.

And it all started because Marie Kendall couldn’t afford to pay a professional to take portraits of her children.

Marie Hartig was born in 1854 in the German-speaking Alsace section of France, an area of some turmoil in the 19th Century. In 1872, when she was 18, her parents decided to immigrate to the United States. Almost immediately Marie enrolled in the School for Nurses at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, a pioneering nursing school that used Florence Nightingale’s rules for hygienic cleanliness.

There, she ran into a problem: She fell in love with Dr. John C. Kendall, a resident at Bellevue. Hospital rules forbade “liaisons” between doctors and nurses and she was, in modern parlance, kicked out. 

That didn’t deter Ms. Hartig, who continued her studies and completed her nursing requirements at Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island in New York. 

She also married the doctor. But she did so in ways that were rather unusual in the 1870s. Marie told John Kendall that she did not want a wedding ring, which she considered a symbol of enslavement. Instead, she thought a watch would be a more practical symbol of love. 

What’s more, she did not wish a church wedding. Both the couple’s parents were shocked, especially John’s father,  a staunch Congregationalist and leader of the First Congregational Church. 

John Calvin Kendall had been born in Ridgefield in 1847, a son of another doctor, Calvin H.

Kendall, one of the handful physicians in Ridgefield in the 19th Century. Dr. Calvin Kendall lived and practiced at what is now 85 Main Street, a few doors south of where the First Congregational Church is now (and, back then, the Big Shop, a carriage factory, stood). Of pioneering New England stock, Calvin Kendall was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale who earned his medical degree from the predecessor of  Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He was a pillar of the local church, serving for many years as a deacon.

After their civil ceremony marriage in 1878, Marie and John Kendall are believed to have spent some time living in Ridgefield, probably with John’s parents on Main Street, while John practiced medicine in Norwalk. One of their four children was born here in 1884; Claude Roy Kendall was given his middle name to honor Marie’s mother-in-law, Jane Roy Kendall, who had died two months earlier. During this period of living in Connecticut, three of their four children were born.

      And it was her children that drew Marie Kendall to photography. “Unable to afford photographs of her three children,  Marie saved money to buy her own camera,” reports Ann  Havemeyer, a historian of Norfolk, Conn., and director of its library. To earn the money for the camera, she knitted and sewed clothing to sell, “using skills she had been taught as a child in Europe,” said American Heritage magazine in a 1989 article. 

      Ann Havemeyer has studied Kendall  because in 1884, John and Marie moved with their

children to Norfolk, on the Massachusetts border in the northwest corner of the state. At Bellevue Hospital, one of John Kendall’s classmates had been Dr. William Henry Welch, a son of Dr. William W. Welch, a local doctor in Norfolk. (Dr. William H. Welch went on to found the medical school at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore). The Drs. Welch encouraged John Kendall to locate in Norfolk.

It’s not clear exactly when Marie Kendall began taking pictures. There are prints of Ridgefield scenes dated in the late 1880s and initialed M.H.K. By then she was living in Norfolk and probably visiting her husband’s family here. 

Marie taught herself how to use the camera which, in the 1880s,  meant a large-size box  fashioned of wood and using a bellows for focusing. Into this, a delicate glass negative, encased in a carrier, had to be inserted for each picture. The heavy and rather awkward device was mounted on a tripod. To take a picture, a cover was removed from in front of the lens for a brief period, exposing the 4 by 6 inch negative inside the camera. The photographer had to have a good sense of how long to expose the negative in order to get good results.

Kendall not only took the pictures, but also developed the negatives and prints herself in a darkroom set up in the cellar of her home. This was a lengthy, complicated and even dangerous process involving chemicals that were caustic and poisonous. Kendall would have to mix the i

ngredients for the developers herself, using such chemicals as sodium sulphite, potassium bromide, hydroquinone, and metol, a caustic substance that can lead to chronic dermatitis. After the plate was developed in those chemicals, it got a bath in a fixer that included even worse concoctions composed of extremely caustic sulphuric acid, sodium thiosulfate or “hypo”, and chrome alum, which can irritate both skin and eyes. 

After these treatments, each negative had to be washed for five to 10 minutes, and dried over a stove. Then began the process of making prints from the negatives, which involved more chemicals and more steps. Unlike most photographers of the era, Kendall preferred the more expensive and difficult-to-use platinum photographic paper for her prints because it was more

permanent than silver papers and could better handle subtle tones of gray. 

In a 1930s letter, Kendall said she had by then long ago stopped developing negatives and did not sound the least bit sad about it. She seemed pleased to point out that her old developing room was turned into a coal bin.

By 1893, Kendall had become such a skilled photographer and print-maker that her work was exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where her pictures were given an award of merit. The judges praised her “for a series of photographs displaying a pleasing variety as to subjects, artistic taste, and marked skill in development and finish.”

In 1904, she showed her work at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (commonly known as the St. Louis World’s Fair and inspiration for the 1944 Judy Garland movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”) 

 Kendall published two “souvenir” books in 1900. “Glimpses of Ridgefield” and “Glimpses

of Norfolk” were printed by the Albertype Company in Brooklyn, N.Y., which was well known for its thousands of postcards of communities in the Northeast (many of them from 1915 onward were hand-colored by “starving artists” in need of supplementary incomes). 

Gravure-printed on heavy paper, “Glimpses of Ridgefield” contains more than 100 pictures of Ridgefield taken in the late 1880s and the 1890s, including Main Street views, many mansions and historic buildings, schoolhouses and churches, farm scenes, and a number of scenics including a series on West Mountain that clearly took some hiking — carrying many pounds of equipment in dense Victorian clothing —  to obtain.

In 1907, Kendall published a copy of Tennyson’s poem, “Song of the Brook,” illustrated with pictures she had taken. (Her work also appears in Naomi Rosenblum’s 2010 book, “A History of Women Photographers.”)

From the 1880s into the early 1900s, Kendall was also doing commercial work to supplement the family income, taking many portrait pictures, and producing postcard images, calendar pictures, and other shots for various businesses. One of her customers was the local railroad. However, by around 1910, she gave up commercial photography, largely because the advent of inexpensive Kodak box cameras and roll film had made taking pictures easy, and almost everyone was doing their own photography. She sold off some 30,000 glass negatives at a penny apiece,

probably to people who wanted the glass, not the pictures emulsified on it. She kept only “a small group” that were “personally interesting,” most of which are now in the archives of the Norfolk Historical Society.

The fact that Marie Kendall had 30,000 negatives reflects how many thousands of hours she must have spent at photography over three decades. At the same time, she was raising a family of four children and was a doctor’s wife who, as a nurse, probably helped with the practice. She also endured tragedy— her 21-year-old, Yale-educated engineer son was electrocuted by a wire while he was working for General Electric.

Dr. Kendall, who had been active in the civic life of the Norfolk community, died in 1921. Marie lived until 1943. Clearly, her extensive exposure to photographic chemicals did not affect her longevity — she was 89 years old at her death.

For decades after she stopped taking photographs, the work of Marie Kendall had been almost forgotten, except among a few historians of Norfolk, Litchfield County, and Ridgefield. However, in 2013-14 the Connecticut Historical Society mounted an exhibit, “Through a Different Lens: Three Connecticut Women Photographers,” that featured her work and two other pioneering women. 

In 2018, major Kendall events are planned including a Norfolk Historical Society exhibit of  her pictures, the digitizing of many of her images that will be placed online, and the publication of a book about her life and her photography. 

Jacqueline Seligmann: 

The Unhappy Heiress

Jacqueline Seligmann was one of the more unusual people to have lived in Ridgefield. The daughter of a famous Parisian art dealer, she became both an accomplished photographer and a racecar driver in 1930s France, and was known throughout our area in the early 1960s as a skilled bridge player. But her later life in Ridgefield included seemingly endless battles with her family and the IRS, and she died alone with a house full of cats and worried about “detectives.”

Jacqueline Reine Louise Seligmann was born in 1906, a daughter of Jacques and Ella Grunebaum Seligmann. Her father was an internationally famous art dealer, with galleries on the Place Vendôme in Paris and on Fifth Avenue in New York City. His clients included Baron Edmond de Rothschild of France, the Stroganoff family of Russia, and Sir Philip Sassoon of England. In America, he had advised J.P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst in their art purchases, and had helped Benjamin Altman build a collection that was later given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jacques Seligmann died in 1923, when Jacqueline was still a teenager.

Her old brother, Germain Seligman (he spelled his name with only one N) was a celebrated hero in World War I, earning the French Croix de Guerre with six citations. He had helped his father in running the business, and continued managing the business after his father’s death.

During the 1930s, Jacqueline Seligmann earned a wide reputation as both a professional photographer and as a professional racecar driver. Even today, her photographs appear in art auctions. 

During her years on the French racing circuit, she met Edmee Chapelle, who was a French writer and amateur race driver. The two women became partners until Emdee’s death in Ridgefield in 1954.

During the early part of World War II, Seligmann and Chapelle volunteered as drivers of trucks that evacuated children from the path of the invading German army.

According to a 1943 interview in The New York Times, the two “left Paris two days before the German invasion, driving 300 miles south to Mont-Dore with other women drivers in their unit.

The trucks were crowded with refugees and records of the Ministry of Armament, Mrs. Chapelle related. It had been their plan, she added, to remain in Mont-Dore for the duration, but they had to alter their plans a few days later…Accompanied by a 13-year-old wire-haired terrier named Pouff, and Briquet, an 11-year-old toy Schnauzer, they immediately set out for the Spanish border and finally made Lisbon and a boat to America. The two dogs are still with them and represent their only ties with home.”

However, they also brought with them about 6,000 negatives of pictures taken in various European and North African countries, which were turned over to the U.S Naval Intelligence to help in the war effort.  Seligmann had shot many of the photos.

By 1943, they had settled in New York City where the Seligmann family had many ties through their gallery in Manhattan. There they established the Seligmann-Chapelle Photographic Studio. They also served with a city wartime agency designed to help reunite families — especially children — separated after a bombing attack.

In the 1940s, Seligmann acquired a modest old house on Old West Mountain Road as a country retreat and, with Chapelle, brought along their two dogs that had accompanied them on their escape from France. Over the years they began to acquire many cats “of which they were both very fond,” said Karl S. Nash, publisher of the Ridgefield Press, who often played bridge with Seligmann.

Seligmann’s widely publicized and often bizarre legal battles involving her family and her inheritance began in 1953 when, at the urging of other members of the Seligmann family, a court ordered her to account for the estate of her mother, Ella, who had died in 1940 and for which she was administrator. Missing was a painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a 19th Century French artist, said to be worth $50,000 ($450,000 in today’s dollars).  She refused to turn over the picture and the court eventually relieved her of her administrator’s position, turning over supervision of the estate  to two banks, including City Trust Company in Bridgeport. In 1963, City Trust sued Seligmann for return of the Ingres painting plus $50,000 damages. A court even had a deputy sheriff search her home, but the painting was never found.

Relations with her family worsened. In 1961, Seligmann wrote President John F. Kennedy, complaining about the “irregularities” in the Internal Revenue Service, the Surrogate Court of New York, and the sheriff’s office in New York, charging that these agencies were mistreating her at the instigation of her relatives. She supplied corroborating documents. White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, no less, responded and said her documentation was being turned over to “appropriate government officials.”

Two years later — and shortly before he was assassinated — she wrote Kennedy a long,

letter in which she rattled off charges against government agencies, but again blamed it all on her family, especially her brothers Germain and Francois Gerard. The family had duped the agencies, she said, ticking off dozens of examples of how she was placed under attack by the government, banks, individuals, and by hired agents of the family, whom she called “detectives.”

Speaking of herself, she asked the President: “How, in the 20th Century, can any human being be kept prisoner, for years, in her own home, be watched day and night, live under unshingled and leaky roofs which the insurance has not repaired for two years, unable even to have the bare necessary painting done, sadistically being denied any of the style and life she has been accustomed to.” She added that, to prevent her records from being stolen, she constantly carted around a “45-pound bag” full of  documents  that exposed “this incredible conspiracy and embezzlement” by her family.

In another letter to the president, Seligmann recalled a story that her mother used to tell about her father. “When a poor man steals 100 dollars, he is thrown into prison, but when a rich man steals 100 million dollars, people lift their hats and say ‘How do you do, Mr. Seligmann.’” 

“My father may have been unethical, I cannot judge,” Seligmann said. “But he had a grandeur and generosity.” His sons, in-laws and cousins, she said, “are only petty thieves, embezzlers, sadists, and slanderers.” In 1940, she added, Germain had even spread a rumor   that Emdee Chapelle was “a spy.”

By 1967, Seligmann was fighting the Internal Revenue Service, which had notified her that she owed some $100,000 in back taxes ($730,000 today) for the years 1958 through 1964. Acting as her own attorney, Seligmann maintained in a court filing that “plaintiff owes no taxes whatsoever because of her losses which would have to be computed in the billions or more.”

The New York Times reported that she attributed her losses to the opening by her family of “a plethora of financial accounts” all over the world and creation by them of “endless real and fictitious trusts, guardianships, foundations, corporations, and partnerships in 50 states and abroad.” As a result, she alleged, she had 17 IRS numbered accounts in her name, including one listing her as a French citizen and another as a Hungarian (she had become U.S. citizen in the 1940s).

The case dragged on into 1969, an especially sad year for Seligmann. That September, her house on Old West Mountain Road caught fire due to a defective furnace, and was destroyed. Seligmann and 27 cats escaped from the burning house before firemen arrived. 

“The cats were all over the place,” reported Fire Captain Richard McGlynn. Other cats had died in the blaze, he added.

Also destroyed in the fire were 14,000 rare books, antiques, paintings, Oriental wood carvings, sculptures, and a valuable daguerreotype collection as well as Seligmann’s negatives and cameras.

 One month after the fire, she was due in U.S. Tax Court in New York City. In advance, she placed a small advertisement in The New York Times, saying “REQUEST LARGEST POSSIBLE ATTENDANCE AT MY TRIAL Monday, October 6 … for non-payment income taxes.  I WILL REPRESENT MYSELF. No lawyer retained by me. I can be recognized by 4 missing front teeth and dislocated left shoulder. I am staying temporarily at Stonehenge Inn, Ridgefield, Conn. MISS JACQUELINE SELIGMANN of Ridgefield, Conn, of the art dealers family.”

Four people — three supporters and one New York Post reporter — showed up that October Monday.

In court, Seligmann blamed her house fire on her family. She had called a repair service for her defective furnace, but none had shown up. “The detectives hired by my family prevented the repairman from coming,” Seligmann told the court. “They are always doing things like that. Look at my little Triumph. After 18,000 miles, they started pouring acid on the chassis. At 20,000 miles, it broke in two.”

She repeated her contention that she owed the government nothing. “My money has all been embezzled,” she said. “That’s why they’ve (her family) hired the detectives, because there’s so much money involved. There have been endless forgeries. They even used a computer to forge my name. When this case is over, it’ll turn into something like billions.”

She charged that “my family has even hired a girl to impersonate me. Now she can go places where I’m not supposed to go, and I can’t go anywhere at all.”

Outside the courtroom after the session, Seligmann asked The Post reporter where she could get a new muffler to replace the one that had fallen off her car.

“They loosened it,” she said.

“The detectives?” asked the reporter.

“Yes,” she said.

Seligmann and the IRS eventually agreed to an undisclosed settlement.

She continued to live in Ridgefield with her cats, eventually acquiring a home on Barrack Hill Road. She was a familiar sight in town, driving a classic Buick Skylark convertible that often had cases of cat food in the back seat. She continued to maintain that “detectives” hired by her family were following her, even spying on her from cameras they had secretly mounted on utility poles outside her house.

She died in 1979 at the age of 73 and is buried in Fairlawn Cemetery, alongside Emdee Chapelle.
“How sad it is to be an heiress,” she had said in her 1963 letter to President Kennedy.

Joseph Hartmann: 

Artist and Historian on Glass

Joseph Hartmann may have thought himself an artist, but it’s doubtful he considered himself a historian. Yet, the photographs he took of Ridgefield and its people from the 1890s through the 1930s

are a graphic history of the town in one of its most fascinating periods.

Pictures of rich and poor, young and old, luxurious mansions and dusty workshops, are included in the 6,000 negatives he left behind. Almost all the negatives are on glass plates — he worked most of his years with a large-sized camera in the days before “film” was available. For each photograph, a glass negative had to be inserted into the back of the camera. He stuck with glass well into the 1920s, switching to a plastic negative late in his career.

A son of a physician, Josef Hartmann was born in 1867 in a German village not far from Munich, a great artistic center. He studied photography in Italy and was accomplished at his art when he came to the United States with his father in 1888.

Around 1890, he set up a studio in the top floor of the Bedient building at Main Street and Bailey Avenue — it burned down in the great fire of 1895, but he moved into its replacement soon afterwards. Over the years that followed, he took thousands of portraits in that studio. He also photographed weddings, civic and social groups, babies, musicians, insides and outsides of houses, cars, gardens, pets, and even bodies in caskets. 

“His work, characterized by the use of natural light and perfection of pose and detail, clearly

shows the influence of the Munich painting school,” said a 1981 article in Antiques Weekly.

His later work was influenced by Frederic Remington and Frederick Dielman, noted American artists who lived in Ridgefield and were friends of Hartmann. 

“His photographs … are marked by richness and depth of tone, marvelous resolution and perfection of composition,” the article said. 

In 1898, Hartmann married Amalie L. Diedrich (1867-1943), who had been working as a German teacher for the children of the Rufus King family on King Lane. They had three children,

including Elsa Hartmann, who became a longtime teacher at Ridgefield High School.

Hartmann was a longtime member of the choir of St. Stephen’s Church. 

Hartmann, who lived  on Catoonah Street just west of the post office, retired in 1938 due to

declining health, and died in 1942.

For many years after his death, his glass negatives sat in boxes in an unheated barn next to the Hartmann homestead on Catoonah Street, two doors west of the post office (next to the Cumming house that’s about to be torn down). 

In 1950, daughter Elsa donated the collection to The Ridgefield Press, hoping that they would

be cared for and that their images would be published in the newspaper.

“I personally carried the boxes of plates out of the barn cellar and took them by car, first to a garage at my house, then to The Press office,” recalled Press publisher Karl S. Nash in 1990. He did

not point out that the boxes were exceedingly heavy since they were packed tightly with big, glass plates.

For more than a decade, the boxes of negatives remained stored in the newsroom of The Press. Many were turned into prints that appeared in The Ridgefield Press, especially in the long-running

“Old Ridgefield” series that attempted to get many identified. The Press was assisted by The Hartmann Society, formed in the early 1980s by Barbara Wardenburg and others to both preserve and identify the pictures.

The Press in 1990 donated the collection to the Keeler Tavern Museum, which with the help of

the Hartmann Society and others, set about not only getting modern negatives and prints made from each plate, but also figuring out the people and places depicted. Committees of oldtimers worked for years to identify as many pictures as possible.

The museum still holds the collection today.

Many of Hartmann’s pictures were used in the 1999 book, “Images of America: Ridgefield,” produced by the Ridgefield Archives Committee, a sort of successor of the Hartmann Society that has melded into the Ridgefield Historical Society. The book is still in print today.