author
Jerome A. Barhydt
1849–1922
Best known for a practical late-19th-century guide to crayon portraiture, this little-documented American writer worked at the crossroads of photography and art instruction. His surviving book offers a clear window into how photographers and amateur artists learned to color and finish enlarged portraits in that era.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Jerome A. Barhydt (1849–1922) is known today for Crayon Portraiture, a manual on making crayon portraits on photographic enlargements. Records available through library and public-domain book sources consistently identify him with that work, and they place him in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The book presents itself as a hands-on guide for photographers and amateur artists, covering techniques for crayon work, transparent liquid water colors, and related finishing methods. Later editions note that it was a revised and enlarged follow-up to an earlier treatise, which suggests Barhydt was writing for a working audience interested in practical studio methods rather than theory alone.
Beyond that publication, reliable biographical detail appears to be quite scarce. Based on the sources available here, the safest picture is of a specialized instructional author whose work helps preserve the history of photographic portrait retouching and coloring at a time when photography and drawing often overlapped.