Thomas Mickell Burnham

Thomas Mickell Burnham was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He moved to Detroit in 1836 and began working as a sign painter. He established his own studio in 1838, specializing in portraits, genre scenes, and satirical paintings. After traveling briefly to Scotland in 1839 he moved back to Boston in 1840, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. During his career Burnham exhibited at the National Academy and the Apollo Association in New York and the Athenaeum in Boston. In 1852 he went to the studio of Truman C. Bartholomew in Melrose, Massachusetts, to contribute to John Wesley Jones’s Great Pantoscope of California, the Rocky Mountains, Salt Lake City, Nebraska and Kansas. The large-scale panorama was based on over a thousand daguerreotypes and sketches that Jones and his assistants had made on their 1851 journey from California to St. Louis.