130 black and white photographs of historic Dutch houses and nearby landscapes in New York's Hudson Valley (Albany, Ulster, Dutchess and Westchester Counties) taken by photographer Margaret De Motte Brown in the 1920s. Each is signed. The images were used to illustrate the book "Historic Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley before 1776" by Helen Wilkinson Reynolds (1926). Margaret De Motte Brown was an Illinois-born photographer who studied with Clarence White in New York City, and was an early member of the Pictorial Photographers of America. She operated a studio in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Margaret de Motte Brown, born in Illinois, studied photography in New York with Clarence White, one of the preeminent pictorialist photographers of the late 19th-early 20th centuries. She was associated first, with the Photo Secession, and after White and Gerturde Kasebier split with that group, with the Pictorial Photographers of America, for which she served as corresponding secretary. In 1918, after inheriting some money from an uncle, Margaret left her teaching job at the Illinois School for the Deaf in Jacksonville, IL, and opened a photography studio in Poughkeepsie, New York. She resumed exhibiting her work, and also began collaborating with a Poughkeepsie neighbor, Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, on "Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley before 1776" (1929). The book was sponsored by a local historical society whose historian was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Brown also provided photographs for "Pre-Revolutionary Dutch Houses and Families in Northern New Jersey and Southern New York" by Rosalie Fellows Bailey (1936), a continuation of Reynolds' work. She died in Springrield, Massachusetts in 1959.

1 linear foot. 1 box; 103 photographs

All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Manuscripts Librarian. Permission for publication is given on behalf of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained.

COLLECTION STORED OFF-SITE. Advance notice required for access.