C.M. Bell Studio

C.M. Bell Studio Historic repository containing the photography (1862-1910) of Charles Milton Bell and Bell & Bros.

09/06/2026

For more than a century, thousands of C. M. Bell glass-plate negatives have survived scratched, cracked, faded, and broken. Today, AI gives us a remarkable new tool, not to rewrite the past, but to recover what time nearly erased. The C. M. Bell Restoration Project is bringing these faces back into view, one damaged photograph at a time

09/02/2026

In the years following the Civil War, Bell & Brother photographed the great public buildings of Washington, D.C., including the monumental U.S. Patent Office.

Construction began in 1836, and the vast Greek Revival complex was completed in 1867.

08/25/2026

Around 1902, Dr. L. F. Davis stepped before the camera at the C. M. Bell Studio in Washington, D.C., dressed as a man of unmistakable professional standing.

Davis was a prominent Washington dentist who served as president of the District of Columbia Dental Society in 1903–1904 and later taught clinical dentistry at Georgetown University. Contemporary dental publications also record him demonstrating new techniques in crown and bridge work to fellow dentists.

By the time these portraits were made, C. M. Bell had been dead for nearly a decade. His widow, Annie Colley Bell, continued operating the famous Pennsylvania Avenue studio, with photographers working under her direction and her sons, Colley and Charles Bell, helping carry the family business forward.

With top hat, cane, high collar, and carefully chosen clothes, Davis was not merely sitting for a photograph. He was presenting himself as a successful professional in turn-of-the-century Washington.

More than 120 years later, the Bell negatives allow us to look directly into his face again.

#1902

08/24/2026

Of teaching history:

08/21/2026

In 1894, Washington photographer Charles Milton Bell photographed a distinguished man whom his studio records identify as Henry Williams.

The strongest candidate is Henry Eugene Williams, born in 1844, a Civil War veteran who spent decades in the federal weather service. By the 1890s, he was serving in Washington, eventually becoming Chief of the Forecast Division and later Assistant Chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau.

If the identification is correct, Bell’s portrait preserves the face of a man who lived through the Civil War and later helped shape the emerging science of American weather forecasting.

08/18/2026

More than a century ago, these children were brought into the C. M. Bell Studio in Washington, D.C., dressed carefully and posed before the camera.
Their portraits remind us why photography mattered so deeply to nineteenth-century families. A photograph could mark a birthday, preserve a new dress, record a growing child, or become a precious likeness sent to relatives far away.
In an age when childhood was more fragile than it is today, these images carried an emotional weight that is easy to underestimate.
The families are gone. The names have disappeared. But the glass negatives survived, and these children can still look back at us.

08/15/2026

Frances Hodgson Burnett is remembered for Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden, but behind those beloved stories was a complicated family life marked by ambition, success, grief, and loss.

In this video, we look at rare C. M. Bell Studio portraits of Burnett and her son Vivian, including a striking image of Frances standing beside a woman identified in the studio record only as her “friend.” We also explore the life of her husband, Dr. Swan Moses Burnett, a respected Washington ophthalmologist, and trace the very different lives of their two sons, Lionel and Vivian.

Lionel died of tuberculosis at only sixteen, a loss that profoundly affected both Frances and Swan. Vivian, meanwhile, became closely associated with the character of Cedric in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and the famous “Fauntleroy” look followed him for much of his life.

These photographs offer a rare glimpse of the real family behind some of the most enduring children’s literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

08/13/2026

At first, the dog is where we expect him to be, beside a young boy, looking almost as deliberately posed as his human companion.
But in the photographs of C. M. Bell, something unusual happens.
Sometimes the people disappear entirely.
The dogs become the portrait.
They sit alone before Bell’s camera, carefully positioned and expected to hold still, their expressions preserved on glass with the same seriousness given to any Washington sitter.
Someone brought each of these dogs to the studio. Someone paid to have the portrait made. Someone wanted this particular face remembered.
Their names may be lost to us now.
But the affection behind these photographs is unmistakable.
These are the dogs of C. M. Bell.

08/11/2026

Among the surviving glass negatives from Washington photographer C. M. Bell is this elegant young woman, identified only as “Miss Reese.” She was photographed sometime between 1901 and 1903, but no first name survives. Searching the 1900 Washington, D.C., census narrows the possibilities. Two women stand out, Rebecca L. Reese and Viola E. Reese, both born around 1880 and both living in Washington at the time. Either would have been about twenty-one to twenty-three when Bell made these portraits.
For now, she remains a mystery, but perhaps not for much longer.

08/09/2026

In 1861, an unidentified woman sat for a portrait at the Bell & Brother photographic studio in Washington, D.C.

At the time, the principal photographers were brothers Jackson Wood Bell and Nephi Bell. Their younger brother, Charles Milton Bell, was only thirteen years old and still years away from becoming one of Washington’s best-known portrait photographers.

For Civil War wives and families, photographs could carry extraordinary meaning. A likeness might be sent with a letter, carried by a husband leaving for camp, or preserved at home during months or years of uncertainty.

We do not know this woman’s name. Her carefully arranged hair, dark dress, brooch, chain, and wedding ring are among the few clues she left behind.

More than 160 years later, her identity has disappeared. Her face remains.

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465 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington D.C., DC
20001

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