{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03268164575430406, 'fraction_numerical': 0.048730668222935515, 'mean_word_length': 4.647446457990116, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Doll and Richards Gallery

The Boston art gallery Doll and Richards contributed significantly to that city's emergence as an important artistic center in the latter half of the 19th century. Dating from the late 1830s or the mid1840s, it is second in age among Boston art concerns only to Williams and Everett, which was founded in 1810.1 Doll and Richards, along with Williams and Everett and the better-known Seth M. Vose Gallery, became famous for its promotion of French Barbizon paintings and their American counterparts during the 1860s and 1870s, when Americans considered such works avant-garde.2 The gallery is also important as having been the Boston dealer for the paintings of Winslow Homer. Like most galleries of the 1840s and 1850s, the firm in its early years is more properly described as an art supplier than as an art dealer, emphasizing the sale of picture frames and looking glasses, not paintings. In Sketches and Business Directory of Boston, Massachusetts, 18601861, for example, the firm was described in a full-page advertisement as a "wholesale looking glass warehouse manufacturers of looking-glasses, picture frames and mouldings [and] importers and dealers in French and German looking-glass plates and picture glass." " The listings in The Boston Directory for the founder and first proprietor, John Sowle, do suggest, however, that "pictures" (probably engravings and prints) were also sold from the beginning. The gallery that later became Doll and Richards existed under a variety of names at numerous Beacon Hill locations from 1845 to 1865.4 The constant was John Sowle as either the principal or sole owner. From 1845 to 1849, the firm was known as Sowle and Shaw (Albert), and was located at 52 Cornhill Street. In 1848 or 1849, it hired Joseph Ward, apparently a specialist in lithographic prints; in 1850, he replaced Shaw as Sowle's partner and the firm's name was changed to Sowle and Ward, located at 42 Comhill (1850-1855) and 14 Summer (1856-1860). Sowle probably met his next partner, Charles W. Jenks, at Boston's Adams House, where the former boarded in 1856 and the latter worked as a clerk from 1850 to 1856. Sowle hired Jenks as a clerk in 1857 and made him his partner in 1861. The firm was then known as Sowle and Jenks until 1863, and as the John Sowle Company from 1863 to 1865. In 1866, Charles E. Hendrickson, E. Adams Doll, and J(oseph) Dudley Richards assumed control of the gallery at 14 Summer Street, subsequently known as Hendrickson, Doll and Richards. With the change in name came a change in the gallery's locationto 28 Summer in 1867-and a change in emphasis. Picture frames and looking glasses continued to be sold, but the sale of oil paintings became the firm's primary business. Charles E. Hendrickson, whose name remained first on the letterhead until 1871 when the firm finally assumed the name Doll and Richards (and moved once again, to 145 Tremont), was probably the oldest of the three partners. He was the connection between John Sowle and Hendrickson, Doll and Richards, as he had been a bookkeeper (1861-1862) and salesman (1863-1865) for the former. These two jobs and his occupational listing in 1871 and 1872 as a salesman of "looking-glasses, mouldings, etc.," suggest that he was involved in many of the aspects of running the gallery other than the sale of paintings.5 This apparently was the responsibility of Messrs. Doll and Richards.