Noble, Skelton Stanford

SKELTON STANFORD NOBLE (b. c. 1833 Missouri; active in Petaluma 1874-1876) Noble traveled throughout California staying in numerous communities for various amounts of time. He worked in Petaluma with A. W. Fell in the Noble & Fell’s partnership in 1874 and sometime after operated the studio by himself as the imprint of his cartes de visit replace “Noble & Fell’s” with simply “S. S. Noble, Sunbeam Gallery, Main Street, Petaluma, Cal. Next door to Wickersham’s & Co’s Bank.” Palmquist, pgs. 420-421; Mautz, pg. 99 and 128.

On December 12, 1873 an advertisement in the Petaluma Weekly Argus proclaimed that the Sunbeam Gallery was “still in the field” and that A. W. Fell & Company would provide the “best style of the art, at Anderson’s set prices”; however, just seven days later, an advertisement proclaimed that Nobel & Fell were the successors to H. Anderson’s Sunbeam Gallery.

Bibliography: Carl Mautz, Biographies of Western Photographers, A Reference Guide to Photographers Working in the 19th Century American West, Expanded and Revised Edition, 2018, p.154. Petaluma Weekly Argus, December 12, 1873, p. 2; Dec. 19, 1873, p. 2. https://digital.sonomalibrary.org/about/photographers

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