This unusual portrait is of Annie Cooney, born in Williamsburg, Mass. as the last child of an Irish immigrant saloon keeper who had done fairly well for himself and could afford to indulge her. It casts her in the quite extraordinary (for a woman of the 1880s) role of huntress, posed in a plaster simulacrum of the outdoors, outfitted with a shotgun and a large supply of shells. It displays her prowess in the form of a couple of well-worn stuffed rabbits and a quail or grouse. One wonders whose idea this was: was it a gag? -- and what her friends (and the lawyer she married a few years later) thought when they saw it. Compare it with the much more conventional portrait of Alice C. House by the same studio elsewhere in this Digital Treasures collection. The image is a standard-sized cabinet card, 4.25 x 6.5 inches.
Permission to publish the image must be obtained from the Williamsburg Historical Society by writing to ddarienzo@cwmars.org or Meekins@cwmars.org. The Williamsburg Historical Society, Williamsburg, Mass., must be credited as the original source of the item for all use.
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