Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage

Hide caption

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.

Hide caption

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.

Hide caption

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 watercolor designs that honor her aristocratic lifestyle, depicting family and friends, the estates they owned or visited, the jewelry and finery they wore, and the various pastimes they enjoyed.

Like many others in this album, this page celebrates familial connection and continuity, with an interlocking diamond composition emphasizing stability and permanence, even as dresses, shoes, and sleeping dog spill into neighboring territory. Lady Jocelyn placed Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, her stepfather, at the top of the design; her mother, Lady Palmerston, at the base; and various children and grandchildren in between.

Hide caption

A privileged childhood in England and Ireland led, in 1858, to Victoria Alexandrina Hare's marriage to Charles Anderson-Pelham. Four years later, Charles succeeded to the earldom of Yarborough, inheriting a parliamentary seat in the House of Lords and an estate so vast that it ranked him as the thirteenth-largest landowner in England and Wales. As Countess of Yarborough, Victoria's new responsibilities included managing the household at Brocklesby Park, hosting country-house parties and fox hunts, and ensuring family continuity by producing four children.

Lady Yarborough began this album just two years after becoming countess, and it celebrates the festivities and social networking of her new position. With forty-five collage designs interspersed among cartes de visite of the notables who frequented her country-house parties, the album records scenes of dinner and dancing, croquet, hunting, and card playing. The witty and amusing photocollages themselves might have contributed to the entertainment of visiting aristocrats, at the same time reminding them that it was the Yarboroughs who orchestrated their merriment. This page parallels and parodies the parlor game Mixed Pickles in which elements of sentences written on scraps of paper were haphazardly drawn from a jar and montaged together. Instead of pieces of paper, here watercolor figures with heads trimmed from photographs—including Lady Yarborough; her brother-in-law, Cuthbert Larking; and Lady Filmer—are jumbled into a jar, and Lord Yarborough is poised outside the container with his pickle fork.

Note: In the exhibition galleries, this album will be open to a different page beginning March 9.

Hide caption

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 idealized 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.

Hide caption

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 emphasize 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."

Hide caption

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.

Note: In the exhibition galleries, this album will be open to a different page beginning March 23.

Hide caption

In this scene, staged in her fashionably appointed drawing room, Lady Filmer depicts herself as a collector of photographs, standing close to her albums, pot of glue, and paper knife. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (a coveted guest whose presence was an impressive coup for any society hostess), leans jauntily against the table in the center of the room. Filmer and the prince enjoyed a well-known flirtation, one that was conducted in part through the exchange of photographs, and his picture appears frequently in her album. His large figure contrasts with that of her seemingly diminutive husband, Sir Edmund Filmer, who is seated near a dog in the lower-right corner. By placing the prince next to her albums, Lady Filmer hinted that these volumes played a role in her social success and that the prince might have enjoyed her visual games.

Hide caption

Although the identity of the maker of this album remains a mystery, the initials E.P.B. and J.P.B. on two collages and the name Bouverie on another suggest that it belonged to the Pleydell-Bouverie family. The E and the J could indicate Elizabeth Balfour Pleydell-Bouverie and her daughter Jane or, alternately, Elizabeth's second cousins Ellen and Janet Pleydell Bouverie. Regardless of the identity of the album's maker, the volume clearly contains collages produced by multiple hands. Besides the presence of two sets of initials, two different styles of drawing are also apparent: one using brown ink and wash, matching the tonality of the photographs, and another, as in the example shown here, using a brilliant watercolor palette with careful perspective and shading.

Some of the fanciful imagery in Victorian photocollages can be attributed to newly popular children's tales such as those by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Album makers reveled in the chance to play with the scale shifts among people and animals featured in these fantastic stories, and photographs of children made charming subjects for fairy-tale settings. This particular page may be related to Andersen's story of Thumbelina, a tiny girl who experiences misadventures—including her kidnapping by an evil toad—before she is saved by a swallow and taken in by a group of fairies living in flowers.

Note: In the exhibition galleries, this album will be open to a different page beginning March 23.

Hide caption

It is unclear whether this album already contained photocollages when the twenty-one-year-old Constance Cochrane-Baillie gave it to her younger sister Amy, or whether it was a blank album to be filled by Amy in the years to come. Whichever is the case, multiple hands are evident on its pages. The album's scenes of country-house life and London cosmopolitanism seem alternately to validate and to parody the aristocratic society in which the girls grew up. With a quirky sense of humor and an affinity for the bizarre, the photocollages often function as tongue-in-cheek jokes about their social milieu.

Croquet had recently emerged as an amusing pastime. Originally played on the lawns of country estates, it implicitly signaled wealth and land ownership. It also provided ample time for men and women to mingle while participating in a sanctioned activity; poems, stories, and articles of the day explicitly linked croquet and flirtation. A spoof on the history of the game noted, "Its practice sometimes leads to matrimony; more often to serious flirtation; and is, generally, a very fair excuse for an hour or two's trifling on a hot summer's afternoon."

Hide caption

The daughter of the Prince and Princess of Denmark, Alexandra was an acknowledged beauty who was groomed from a young age for marriage to European royalty. When she wed Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, on March 10, 1863, Alexandra was warmly welcomed by her British subjects and became a beloved member of the royal family. The couple established a London residence at Marlborough House and a country residence at Sandringham, quickly becoming the leaders of fashionable English society.

As Princess of Wales and later as queen, Alexandra maintained a lifelong interest in posing for, collecting, and even making photographs. In fact, her courtship with the Prince of Wales was conducted through the exchange of cartes de visite. The official photographs of their wedding, which sold thousands of copies, made her a celebrity and started the tradition of royal wedding photography. A later portrait of Alexandra with her daughter Louise became the bestselling carte de visite in England.

The album shown in the exhibition—made during the period Alexandra bore three of her five children—memorializes the early years of her marriage and cements her image as a wife and a mother. Although the Prince of Wales was known to have a wandering eye (see the page from the Filmer Album), his wife's collages feature him in scenes of family life. The album's photocollages include remarkably accomplished watercolor designs across a range of themes, portraying Alexandra as central to elite society, with members of her set arranged into vignettes revolving around her. The collage displayed here features layered photographs of members of the royal family from a variety of sources while also demonstrating Princess Alexandra's skill in decorative painting.