Category: New York

Exhibition dates: 2nd February – 9th May, 2010

Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the images in this posting. Please click on the photographs for more information about the images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Kate Edith Gough (English, 1856-1948)
Untitled page from the Gough Album
Late 1870s
Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints
14 5/8 x 11 5/8 in. (37 x 29.5cm)
V&A Images / Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Kate Gough was one of fourteen children born to the wealthy businessman Thomas Rolls Hoare and his wife, Emma. Although the Hoares possessed neither title nor land, their vast accumulated fortune allowed them to emulate the aristocratic lifestyle, renting a Sussex estate and dividing their time between the country and the city, where they enjoyed a variety of cultural amusements. Kate read widely, from Charles Dickens to Punch magazine, while also learning such feminine accomplishments as sketching and china painting. In 1878 she met Hugh Gough, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. The couple married in January 1879 and lived the peripatetic life that Lieutenant Gough’s service and their lack of children enabled. Gough probably assembled her album during her courtship and early years of marriage.

A remarkable number of images found in photocollage albums combine humans and animals in fantastical ways; the temptation to cut out a photographed head and place it atop a painted animal seems to have been irresistible. This composition of ducks bearing ladies’ faces – one of them Kate herself, or her identical twin sister, Grace – may have been inspired by Charles Darwin’s new theories of evolution or by political cartoons from magazines such as Punch. On other pages of the Gough Album as well, an irreverent humor, disorienting scale shifts, mischievous visual puns, and whimsical fantasies reveal a sophisticated mind and very accomplished hand.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Frances Elizabeth, Viscountess Jocelyn (English, 1820-1880)
Diamond Shape with Nine Studio Portraits of the Palmerston Family and a Painted Cherry Blossom Surround from the Jocelyn Album
1860s
Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints
11 x 9 1/8 in. (28 x 23.2cm)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The daughter of the exceedingly wealthy Peter Clovering-Cowper, Earl Cowper, and the legendary society hostess Emily Lamb, Countess Cowper, Viscountess Jocelyn was born into a life of privilege and social connections. When her mother remarried after her father died, Frances (known as Fanny) became the stepdaughter of Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, who would become the prime minister in 1855. Fanny also garnered the favor of Queen Victoria, serving as a bridesmaid at her wedding to Prince Albert and later as a Lady of the Bedchamber. In 1841 she wed Robert, Viscount Jocelyn, and bore six children over the next decade. Her husband died in 1854, and she lost each of her children to illness before her own death in 1880.

Unlike the other album makers in this exhibition, Jocelyn practiced amateur photography, using the wet-collodion process, a cumbersome technique that required time, money, education, and skill. A separate section of this album, entitled The Bygone Hours of the Viscountess Jocelyn, features nine photographs that she made of herself and her children in the garden of their estate. Most of the pages in the album, however, are photocollages employing amateur photographs and commercial cartes de visite in highly skilled watercolour designs that honour her aristocratic lifestyle, depicting family and friends, the estates they owned or visited, the jewellery and finery they wore, and the various pastimes they enjoyed.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

The Johnstone Album represents the appropriation by the commercial printing press of an activity that was originally aristocratic and handmade. Here the grids are commercially printed and the collage maker need only paste within the shapes, offering the opportunity for those with less leisure time to create similar family albums.

Maria Harriet Elizabeth Cator (English, d. 1881)
Untitled page from the Cator Album
Late 1860s/1870s
Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints
10 7/8 x 8 1/2 in. (27.7 x 21.7cm)
Hans P. Kraus, Jr., New York

Maria Harriet Elizabeth Cator, the likely maker of this album, filled its pages in the 1860s and 1870s with scenes of her childhood home, portraits of family members, and commemorative collages memorializing her father, who died in 1864, and a young niece who died as a child in 1866. Family mottoes and photographs of country seats belonging to relatives appear throughout the album, suggesting that it was intended more for family than for society. Set among all this seriousness, this image of a playful jester carelessly strewing photographs on the ground is surprising. Instead of serving as mementos of a loved one or records of an ancestral home, the jester’s photographs are stripped of symbolic meaning and used in the service of a lighthearted composition.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Viscount Jocelyn (Great Britain, 1820-1880) attributed to
Circular design containing five male studio portraits and two ships
c. 1860
Leaf 3 from an Untitled Album
Collage (albumen silver photographs, water colour, pencil)
Printed image
28.0 h x 23.2 w cm
Purchased 1985
National Gallery of Canberra

Eva Macdonald (English, 1846/1850-?)
“What Are Trumps?,” from the Westmorland Album
1869
Collage of watercolour and albumen prints
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

A common leisure pastime in Victorian high society, card playing provided opportunities for socializing and flirting. Compositions involving cards are commonly found in photocollage albums, as if to emphasise the playfulness of the process of making such images. In many of these collages, photographic portraits replace the heads of kings and queens, elevating the subjects in rank and giving new meaning to the term “face cards.”

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Elizabeth Pleydell-Bouverie (English, d. 1889) and Jane Pleydell-Bouverie (English, d. 1903) or Ellen Pleydell-Bouverie (English, 1849-?) and Janet Pleydell-Bouverie (English, 1850-1906)
Untitled page from the Bouverie Album
1872/1877
Collage of watercolour and albumen prints
Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

Popular children’s tales by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and Lewis Carroll became fertile material for photocollages, including this one, which appears to relate the story of Thumbelina. Although the identity of the maker of this collection remains a mystery, the initials E.P.B. and J.P.B and the name Bouverie on various pieces suggest that it belonged to the Pleydell-Bouverie family.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

In the 1860s and 1870s, long before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early 20th century, aristocratic Victorian women were experimenting with photocollage. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art February 2 – May 9, 2010, is the first exhibition to comprehensively examine this little-known phenomenon. Whimsical and fantastical Victorian photocollages, created using a combination of watercolour drawings and cut-and-pasted photographs, reveal the educated minds as well as accomplished hands of their makers. With subjects as varied as new theories of evolution, the changing role of photography, and the strict conventions of aristocratic society, the photocollages frequently debunked stuffy Victorian clichés with surreal, subversive, and funny images. Featuring 48 works from public and private collections – including many that have rarely or never been exhibited before – Playing with Pictures will provide a fascinating window into the creative possibilities of photography in the 19th century.

“In other recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan, we’ve shown masterpieces of 19th-century British photography by the period’s most prominent professionals and serious amateurs (almost always men), whose works were often displayed at the annual salons of the photographic societies and sold by printsellers throughout England and Europe,” commented Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. “What is so exciting about this exhibition is that we see a different type of artist – almost exclusively aristocratic women – using photography in highly imaginative ways, and creating pictures meant for private pleasure rather than public consumption. It is an aspect of photography’s history that has rarely been seen or written about.”

In England in the 1850s and 1860s, photography became remarkably popular and accessible as people posed for studio portraits and exchanged these pictures on a vast scale. The craze for cartes de visite – photographic portraits the size of a visiting card – led to the widespread hobby of collecting small photographs of family, friends, acquaintances, and celebrities in scrapbooks. Rather than simply gathering such portraits in the standard albums manufactured to hold cartes de visite, the amateur women artists who made the photocollages displayed in Playing with Pictures cut up these photographic portraits and placed them in elaborate watercolour designs in their personal albums.

With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, Victorian photocollages stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. Often, the combination of photographs with painted settings inspired dreamlike and even bizarre results: placing human heads on animal bodies; situating people in imaginary landscapes; and morphing faces into common household objects and fashionable accessories. Such albums advertised the artistic accomplishments of the aristocratic women who made them, while also serving as a form of parlour entertainment and an opportunity for conversation and flirtation with the opposite sex.

Playing with Pictures showcases the best Victorian photocollage albums and loose pages of the 1860s and 1870s, on loan from collections across the United States, Europe, and Australia, including the Princess Alexandra Album lent by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Thirty-four photocollage album pages will be shown in frames on the wall and 11 separate albums will be displayed in cases, open to a single page. These works will be accompanied by “virtual albums” on computer monitors that allow visitors to see the full contents of the albums displayed nearby. As an introduction, the exhibition also includes two carte-de-visite albums of the period and a rare uncut sheet of carte-de-visite portraits from 1859.

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage is curated by Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography at The Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition is organised at the Metropolitan Museum by Malcolm Daniel.

Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website [Online] Cited 05/06/2010

Women’s Work: Albums and Their Makers

Ann Bermingham, professor, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara

Sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolours are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as the accomplished hands of their makers. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. The exhibition features forty-eight works from the 1860s and 1870s, from public and private collections.

Text from the YouTube website

Society Cut-ups: Victorians and the Art of Photocollage

Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago

Sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as the accomplished hands of their makers. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. The exhibition features forty-eight works from the 1860s and 1870s, from public and private collections.

Text from the YouTube website

Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier (French, 1831-1906)
Untitled page from the Madame B Album
1870s
Collage of watercolour, ink, and albumen silver prints
11 1/2 x 16 1/2 in. (29.2 x 41.9cm)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Mary and Leigh Block Endowment

Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier probably made the album from which this page was taken. Known as Blanche, she was the second wife of the career diplomat Hugues-Marie-Henri Fournier, who was posted in Stockholm and then in Rome during the years the album was made. Among the clues to the maker’s identity are the large painted B that graces the opening page, the many diplomats and Swedish figures and sites that fill the album, and the frequent depictions of the Fourniers and their daughter, Pauline (born 1855).

Because photocollage albums were almost exclusively made by upper-class English women, this album, with its French maker, is a rare exception. Fournier, however, likely was exposed to English diplomats in the international circles in which she traveled, and she may have been inspired to create her own album after seeing other examples or learning of the practice from her English acquaintances. As the second wife of a diplomat, Fournier may have used her album to help establish herself and her family within a specific social set or to demonstrate her role as a new wife. The album may also have functioned as a sort of travelogue, depicting places she visited or was stationed with her husband. The painted elements reveal that the maker of the album was knowledgeable about the artistic styles of various cultures and skilled in botanical and zoological drawing. Together, the photographs and watercolors often combine to create daring and fantastic compositions, transcending the simple recording of friends, family, and sites.

In the accomplished depiction of a peacock butterfly seen here, the “eye” spots on the wings have been replaced with portraits. Such a composition allowed Fournier to exhibit her artistic talents and her knowledge of natural history.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Georgina Berkeley (English, 1831-1919)
Untitled page from the Berkeley Album
1867/71
Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints
10 x 12 5/8 in. (25.5 x 32cm)
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

Despite her lack of title or inheritance, Georgina Berkeley maintained the sophisticated lifestyle that her ancestry provided. Her collages reveal her fascination with London’s urban pastimes as well as her cutting social commentary.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Georgina Berkeley (English, 1831-1919)
Untitled page from the Berkeley Album
1867/71
Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints
10 x 12 5/8 in. (25.5 x 32cm)
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY

As the great-granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Berkeley, Georgina Louisa Berkeley occupied the lower echelon of aristocratic society. Despite her lack of title or inheritance, she maintained the sophisticated lifestyle that her ancestry provided. Georgina and her older sister, Alice, participated in the country-house party circuit, enjoying the hospitality of their many landed and titled relatives. Their home in London’s prestigious Belgravia district also offered them access to the city’s cultural amenities. At age forty-six, Berkeley married a man seven years her junior, Sydney Kerr Buller Atherley, the grandson of the 5th Marquess of Lothian. Sadly, Atherley died just ten months after the wedding. Rather than move back to the home of her father and sister, Georgina upheld her independence, keeping her own household and traveling with or visiting her relatives until her death in 1919.

Berkeley began to assemble the album from which this page is drawn about a decade before her marriage, when she was in her mid-thirties. In her designs, Berkeley constructed a vision of modern life far removed from the secluded domesticity of women that was idealised by middle-class Victorian culture. Many of the pages convey a fascination with London’s cosmopolitan pastimes, depicting bustling streets, theatrical entertainments, and various modes of travel. Berkeley’s photocollages reveal how this particularly modern medium enabled upper-class album makers to represent themselves as independent, urban women.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer (English, 1838-1903)
Untitled loose page from the Filmer Album
mid-1860s
Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints
8 3/4 x 11 1/4 in. (22.2 x 28.6cm)
Paul F. Walter

Constance Sackville-West (English, 1846-1929) or Amy Augusta Frederica Annabella Cochrane Baillie (English, 1853-1913)
Untitled page from the Sackville-West Album
1867/73
Collage of watercolour and albumen silver prints
9 5/8 x 11 13/16 in. (24.5 x 30cm)
Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

This album’s scenes of country-house life and London cosmopolitanism provide tongue-in-cheek commentary regarding the aristocratic society in which the Cochrane-Baille sisters grew up. The album contains a variety of styles suggesting more than one artist. Constance Sackville-West or Amy Augusta Frederica Annabella Cochrane-Baillie.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

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