Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 25 February – 7 June Sculpture Victorious 25 February – 25 May With its fabulous permanent collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Tate Britain always has an embarrassment of riches to offer the Victorian enthusiast, but its latest exhibitions are a further inducement to make the trip to Millbank if you can. Salt and Silver provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of early Victorian photography, bringing together ninety rare salted paper photographs from the mid-nineteenth
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‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’ Conference Report
By Kirsten Harris, University of Nottingham The University of Sheffield’s one day conference ‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’, held on 24th August, centred on the timely question ‘what constitutes nineteenth century studies today?’. This stimulated a thought-provoking and broad set of responses, with some papers offering rethinkings of specific texts, ideas or historical assumptions while others focused on considerations of the changing field itself. The day began with Mark Llewellyn’s interrogation of contemporary engagement with Victorian culture in his keynote paper,
Read moreImages of Victorian Motherhood, Effaced and Exposed
Recently I’ve been contemplating motherhood as it is represented in Victorian hidden mother portraits and Victorian breastfeeding portraits, two fascinating photographic trends. A little over a year ago, I stumbled upon Chelsea Nichols’ post about hidden mothers in Victorian photographs on her blog, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. These images typically depict a shrouded woman holding or standing behind a baby or child, ostensibly to keep the child still for the camera while remaining out of the image. The
Read moreSarah Parker, ‘Dressed to Impress: Fashioning the Woman Poet’
By Sarah Parker The idea for my recent article ‘Fashioning Michael Field: Michael Field and Late-Victorian Dress Culture’ originated with a trip to ‘The Cult of Beauty’ exhibition at the V&A in Spring 2011. Among the walls crowded with Pre-Raphaelite paintings and cabinets filled with intricate, hand-bound volumes, visitors were also able to view numerous examples of male and female aesthetic dress, including a sunflower-print robe and puffed-sleeve artistic tea gowns, many of which originated from Liberty & Co. Viewing
Read moreCelebrity Circulation II: Dickens’s Moving/Images
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Dickens was famously mobile throughout his life, walking miles each day, moving households repeatedly, and traveling often. “If I could not walk far and fast,” he once wrote, “I think I should just explode and perish.”[1] This quote describes an obsession with walking, a physical need to walk not only long distances but quickly at that. Dickens saw walking as essential, writes Rosemary Bodenheimer. Walking allowed The Inimitable “to bring his
Read moreCelebrity Circulation I: Dickens in Photographs
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a photographic image, Charles Dickens circulated far and wide. The man was photographed in excess of 120 times during his life [1], and was among all Victorians, as Joss Marsh recently put it, “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside the royal family” [2]. Ironically, however, Dickens disliked having his photographic image taken. Not only was he concerned that these images gave viewers a lie—a false sense of possessing
Read moreOn the Images of Others
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a Victorianist and a collector with an interest in photography, I decided, about a year ago, to begin amassing my own Victorian photography collection. I soon acquired three daguerreotypes, two tintypes, and eleven cartes-de-visite—all portraits, save two. I know very little about the images—no names, no dates, no locations beyond the photography studio imprinted on the cartes-de-visite. I have become transfixed by how little I know about these images. Two
Read moreThe Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900
by Pearl Chaozon-Bauer University of California, Davis Upon entering “The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900,” an exhibit at the Legion of Honor that features art work and pieces from poets, painters, sculptors, designers and architects who produced art for the sake of art, I expected to be intoxicated and affected by the beauty that the exhibit promised to deliver. Since these artists championed the axiom that the only purpose of art is to be beautiful, I anticipated losing
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