Daguerreotype Portrait of a man with a goatee sketching a smile in a Bakelite Union Case with a relief scene.
 Made by AP Critchlow & Co, this daguerreotype case is a registered design of the company. Relief scenes are molded in bakelite and the interior has, on one side, a piece of embossed velvet and on the other, under the pinchbeck-set daguerreotype, the certificate of origin and the patent.
 The embossed design depicts a gentleman holding his horse and giving charity to a group of three people and a dog.
 The daguerreotype was the first photographic process, developed by Nicéphore Niépce and later Louis Daguerre, and introduced to the world (except the United Kingdom) by France in 1839. It is both a negative and a positive, hence its characteristic mirror effect. In the 19th century, they were also poetically called "mirrors that remember."