Card Number 622, Miss Snowden, from the Actors and Actresses series (N145-3) issued by Duke Sons & Co. to promote Cross Cut Cigarettes

Art Historical Context

This delicate albumen photograph, issued in the 1880s as Card Number 622 in W. Duke, Sons & Co.’s Actors and Actresses series (N145-3), features the portrait of Miss Snowden to promote Cross Cut Cigarettes. Measuring just over two and a half inches tall, the card exemplifies the era’s innovative use of photography in mass-market advertising. Albumen prints, prized for their rich tonal range and fine detail, were affixed to sturdy cardstock so collectors could trade and paste them into albums. Cigarette manufacturers like Duke distributed these miniature celebrity portraits much as later companies would issue baseball cards, turning everyday purchases into opportunities for collecting. Featuring popular stage actresses helped elevate the glamour of tobacco products while capitalizing on the growing cult of theatrical celebrity in late-nineteenth-century America. The small format made the images portable keepsakes that linked personal habit with the excitement of the footlights. Today the card forms part of the Jefferson R. Burdick Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, preserving an important chapter in the history of both photography and commercial ephemera. Its survival offers visitors a vivid glimpse into how visual culture, consumer marketing, and the performing arts intersected more than a century ago.

About the Artist

W. Duke, Sons & Co. · 1870–1920

**W. Duke, Sons & Co.: Pioneers of Chromolithographic Trade Card Art** W. Duke, Sons & Co., an American tobacco manufacturer, emerged from the entrepreneurial vision of Washington Duke (1820–1905) and his sons in Durham, North Carolina. After the Civil War, Washington abandoned farming in 1874 to join his eldest son, Brodie L. Duke, in the burgeoning tobacco trade, establishing a factory that for...