Alex Veness speculates about one woman's motives for having her portrait taken, and for whom the portrait was intended. His enquiry introduces questions about the role of sentiment and emotion in the interpretation of portraiture. Perhaps all portraits had sentimental meaning for some viewer, which is now lost - or is it? As temporally distant and impersonal viewers, can we respond sentimentally to the portrait

University of Northumbria

Veness, Alexander

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

knowing thealex veness, winchester school of art,UKabout the authorHow had the identity of this sitter come to be forgotten? In trying to develop anaccount of this unknown sitter, my immediate response was to construct possiblehistories for this person, to imaginatively flesh out her life story. I wanted to inventa name. Charlotte seemed okay for a Victorian woman. Emily, Alice or Sarah wouldhave worked just as well. Possible names increased exponentially. But hang on:inventing a name would only distance her image from her identity, muddyingeverything by piling pure fiction on to rough guesswork. I decided to stick withP106[19]. Here are two sets of responses, starting with my thoughts about theblurred copy, followed by the original print in the photograph archive of the NationalPortrait Gallery.Blurred Web Copy Of P106[19]I wondered if P106[19] had children when this photo was taken. Perhaps she wasthe stereotype of a Victorian matriarch, popularised by Thackeray, Dickens andold British TV soaps like Upstairs Downstairs? This same portrait might even havemade her children cry after her death, in the way that Roland Barthes describeshis reaction to a photograph of his mother in his famous text on photographs,Camera Lucida. But I reckoned her children could not have seen this photographthat much later in their lives, otherwise we would know her name, perhaps writtenin pencil on the back of the photo. Maybe her family did not imagine a future inwhich she would be unrecognised? Perhaps they were just not interested? Iwondered how she had looked in the many other photos her children had seenof her.What might explain P106[19]’s anonymity is that photographs themselves werea long way from becoming familiar objects in 1855. Besides their unfamiliarity,photographs were not thought of as art in the same way that oil on canvas was.www.unknownsitter.com 1/7       © alex veness 2005Unknown womanMaull & Polyblank, ca. 1855, albumen print, 200x146mmmNational Portrait Gallery, LondonNPG P106 (19)knowing theIn the 1850s even the best photographers (essentially technicians) producedaffordable photo portraits for the general public, while oil painters (academicallytrained artists) made expensive portraits in the tradition of centuries of aristocraticpatronage. A photograph would have been new and different. Furthermore,painted portraits were conventionally displayed in gilded frames in large houses,or in prestigious public exhibitions of art.  Although the first ever recorded publicexhibition of photographs took place at London’s Royal Society for the Arts in1852, three years before P106[19]’s portrait, photography remained a spectacle,a ‘magic technology’ outside fine art practice.(1) By contrast, photo portraits weremechanical domestic images made by technicians: small, intimate and easilyrecognised by the viewer.Photography has been described as a ‘magic technology’. The term describesmachines about which most users do not understand the mechanics. Goodexamples of today’s magic technologies would be the Internet and DVD players.Radio, television and telephones are older magic technologies. In the 1850s thepredominant (perhaps earliest) magic technology was photography, meaningthat photo portraits needed no additional identification. Being a magic technology,a photo portrait looked identical to the sitter, instantly recognisable. The photoportrait was not for general view, or necessarily for posterity: it was a domestickeepsake. Who else could the photo on the mantelpiece portray but the subjectherself: their daughter, wife, mother or employer? The ‘magical’ perfection of thephotograph left no doubt as to its subject.After 1855 techniques of photography improved, becoming easier and cheaper,and there would have been many more photos of P106[19]. Let’s assume shelived to old age, at a time when around ten percent of women in Britain diedduring childbirth (a gruesome statistic when you consider that before modernanalgesics many women died from overdosing on laudanum or opium whilegiving birth). If she had lived to old age (putting her death around 1900), herportraits would have remained as stiff and earnest as this one. If she had beenborn into her children’s generation she would have appeared in more casualphotos, when the rapid pace of technological advancement provided shutterspeeds fast enough for a chance shot with a portable camera. By the 1900swww.unknownsitter.com 2/7       © alex veness 2005knowing theaffordable equipment meant photographs were not commissioned fromprofessionals but taken by family and friends - putting many studios out ofbusiness. But she was not born into that generation, and photography stayed inthe hands of professional studios throughout her life (apart from a minisculegroup of wealthy amateurs). A portrait photograph would therefore have beenrare, entailing carefully selected clothes and poses. So it is probable that onemid-1850s evening she prepared clothes for the next day’s sitting. The followingday she sat for this portrait, perhaps attempting a way to express herself withinthe social constraints of Victorian society, perhaps not; the photo reveals little.A ‘mail order bride’ being photographed for a net-based marriage agency surelyweighs up similar issues today.I thought more about why P106[19] stood in front of a professional photographerthat day. While significantly cheaper than a painting by a trained artist (the mostdesirable being from painters at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly, in the sameroad this photograph was taken), a portrait photo was still expensive enough inthe mid-1800s to need a comfortable income. I thought about who paid for thisimage. Perhaps her father? This could easily be a portrait commissioned by aprofessional man to show off his daughter to prospective husbands. He wouldhave wanted to emphasise her family-building potential: good health and looks,a stable background and a devotion to continue invented traditions of securityand nurture (forged at an unstable time of widening social polarisation and rapidchange). Her portrait checks all the right boxes for these criteria. But is thiswoman really so well to do? Perhaps the answer lies in the environment selectedfor this portrait?Apart from P106[19] herself, the portrait only features a chair. This simplicityechoes age-old conventions in portraiture, going back to renaissance and classicalpainting in Europe, and much further back in Asia. Stark surroundings stressedthe importance of the person shown, although austerity could double as a signof the sitter’s supposed humility. But what does P106[19]’s chair signify here?Not humility. It is styled in a Medieval design, but is likely to have been anindustrially produced, ersatz mediaeval chair, evoking a fantasy of majesty:mediaeval kings, queens, princes, heroes and magicians. It is odd that Britain,www.unknownsitter.com 3/7       © alex veness 2005knowing thethe world’s most hi-tech society in 1855, often masqueraded as a mediaevalfairy-kingdom. An example of this confused identity is still seen at St. Pancrasstation in north London. From the front it appears to be an ornate gothic palace,but its façade hides an advanced iron construction, in reality a terminus for theworld’s most modern rail system at the time. Victorian Britain presented the mostmodern society in the world as its opposite, an ancient, enchanted realm enthralledby a mythic past. To be respectable meant accommodating this myth, expressedhere by a fake historical aesthetic in a simple item of furniture. That a Victorianwoman of P106[19]’s status should subscribe to the whimsical conceit evokedby this fairytale chair seems perfectly natural for her time and her social status,whether or not she was being presented for marriage. This chair is precisely thetype of industrially produced furniture promoted four years earlier at the 1851Great Exhibition, the British Empire’s greatest peace-time display of industrialmight.This concludes the thoughts I had after seeing the blurry copy of P106[19]’sphoto.The Original PrintAfter the grainy pixilated copy I went to the National Portrait Gallery’s photographarchive to look at P106[19] again. This time she was shown in a beautiful albumenprint, about 30 by 23 centimetres. The image must have been astonishing toVictorians who grew up before mechanical images were possible. Albumen printswere a recent innovation, and photography was beginning to change people’sexperience of themselves and their world. I was excited by how the larger sizeand clear resolution of the original 1855 print made me re-assess my guesswork.The first revelation was an ‘exotic’ paisley pattern on P106[19]’s dress. The historyof the paisley pattern starts with Kashmiri designs. This reflects the culturalexchange (however grossly imbalanced) between the British Empire, of whichour sitter was a chief beneficiary, and its most important colony, India. ImperialBritain liked to adapt and adopt pleasant aspects of its colonies’ cultures,particularly from India. This is perfectly displayed by P106[19]’s paisley dress.www.unknownsitter.com 4/7       © alex veness 2005knowing theBut who produced the dress? With the world’s most advanced techniques ofmechanised production, British cloth manufacture was at its peak. In a tradingpattern that was to reverse only after the First World War, nineteenth centuryIndia was a lucrative, protected market for British produced fabrics and clothes.These were cheaply produced, with immense suffering for the machine operatorsin mills and factories in Birmingham, Lancashire and Leeds. Cloth was shippedfrom Britain to its colonies for sale in markets tightly controlled (and duly patrolled)by the world’s most powerful navy. It is certain that the cloth for P106[19]’s dresswas also produced in one of these industrial centres in the midlands and thenorth. However, her dressmaker would probably have been in London.I could see that a small area around the shoulder of P106[19]’s dress was blurreddue to some movement: a nervous twitch, or a cold studio? Maybe this photographwas rejected by P106[19] because of the blurry ‘leg ‘o’ mutton’ puffed sleeve?That could easily explain her anonymity. That’s it, I thought, the photo stayed asan unlisted reject in the studio for years until she was forgotten.The chair’s role became clear. I could see she was supported by the chair sothat she could stay still for the camera’s slow exposure. The camera would havebeen manually opened and closed by the photographer or his assistant. Althoughit acts as a steadying frame, the chair’s design is still important to the portrait’smessage. It projects the paradox of fairytale fantasy merged with an industrialsuperpower.Then I noticed her jewellery. She was wearing a wedding ring (a simple goldband) and a prominent brooch. This was definitely not an advertisement formarriage. She really was, on balance, an imperial matriarch. She also seemeda bit older than I first thought, certainly approaching thirty. It was beginning toseem that here was the wife of a wealthy society figure who had probably hadhis portrait taken ten minutes earlier. If his portrait exists today, I wonder if it isunidentified.P106[19] did not look directly at the camera for this image, but gazed in to themiddle-distance, turned to the viewer’s left. I wonder if she chose to do this, orwww.unknownsitter.com 5/7       © alex veness 2005knowing theif the studio photographer asked her to. There is a very different atmospherewhen a portrait sitter looks directly at the viewer than when they gaze at somethingoutside the picture frame. A distracted gaze can give a portrait a wistful quality.It certainly does here. This pose makes P106[19] look passive, docile anddomestic. Perhaps she did not wear her finest dress after all. She might haveworn a dress to harmonise with the notional virtues of modesty and duty that herinert gaze symbolises. The clarity of the original print shows that her dress isexpensive enough to display economic status, yet restrained to show appropriatevirtue.I found out, without much surprise, that the studio where P106[19] posed waswell established and very elite. So elite that it possessed two addresses, one onGracechurch Street in London’s financial district, and another on Piccadilly, nearBuckingham Palace. London could not offer a more prestigious mix of addresses:the symbolic power of imperial monarchy combined with the genuine power ofcolonial finance. Maintaining these prestigious sites would have been considerablyexpensive. The Maull and Polyblank studios were sufficiently successful at thistime to have been selected to photograph the prominent writer Charles Darwin,also about 1855 (roughly four years before publication of The Origin Of Species).This makes it possible that P106[19] knew Charles Darwin, provoking morespeculation than I can accommodate here. In the 1860s, Maull and Polyblankbecame famous for Photographic Portraits of Living Celebrities, collectible volumesshowing photos of eminent contemporaries. Therefore P106[19] was surely ina wealthier household than I first imagined, among the wealthiest in Britain. Butpeople’s interest in her has been lost. It is easy to accept this happening withancient portraits. The few paintings of Roman faces that survive from Pompeiiare mostly anonymous, as are many friezes showing Roman patricians posingfor portraits on their living-room walls. But at the height of industrial Britain, howcould this wealthy woman’s name have fallen through the cracks?Ultimately, how important is an investigation of P106[19]’s life? Why should herhistory count for more than those women who worked in colonial fields to sourceraw materials for her dress? How does their miserable employment compare tothe wretchedness of our subject’s compatriots (mostly women and children),www.unknownsitter.com 6/7       © alex veness 2005knowing thewhose brutal working conditions and starvation wages led to a wide range of rawtextiles and toxic dyes becoming attractive paisley cloth for her dress? Therewas barely any chance of an enduring document of any of their lives in 1855,aside from brief parish records and a cursory census every decade.(2)In the end, I am aware of how average I imagine her to have been. She couldhave been a genius like Ada Lovelace, the woman who invented an early computercalled the Analytical Engine in the 1840s (see Zeros and Ones, Sadie Plant,1998). The banal truth of this portrait is that it reveals barely anything of thesubject.  Unless her portrait is identified, P106[19] will probably exist for eternityin a netherworld between illusion and identity.Endnotes1 Although the first ever recorded public exhibition of photographs took place at London’s Royal Society for the Arts in 1852, three years before P106[19]’s portrait, photography remained a spectacle, a ‘magic technology’outside fine art practice2 The first modern census is considered to be the 1841 census when eachhouseholder was required to complete a census schedule giving the address of the household, the names, ages, sexes, occupations and places of birth of each individual residing in his or her accommodation.Source: The History of the UK Census www.unknownsitter.com 7/7       © alex veness 2005

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