A late Victorian enlargement
QThis particular photo, which I think dates to c.1880-1890, does not look ‘right’! To me it looks as though the body has been ‘put on’ after the photo was taken; the line of buttons is out of perspective, to my eye, and the left and right shoulders are out of kilter with each other – her left shoulder does not even join her neck at the back and you can see the original shoulder line underneath. I feel that the ‘rose’ looks very false too. Am I reading things wrong or would you say that this photo has been tampered with? Does everything look OK to you?
ADuncan Jack
Judging from its appearance, it is an enlarged, heavily re-touched photograph – a format that was apparently especially popular in the later 1800s, as exemplified here. Indeed, what we can see of the style of the lady’s dark costume displaying a tight-fitting, front-fastening bodice with narrow sleeves and closed neckline showing a glimpse of white collar, and her ornate day cap suggest a date in the 1880s, so your estimate was spot on.
I’m not aware of its dimensions, but assume your picture is larger than the usual carte de visite (10 x 6.5cms) or cabinet card (16.5 x 11.5cms) and is presented on stout card. It was quite common for the above small studio portraits to be enlarged – often just the head and shoulders area, as here – to create a substantial portrait. The enlargement may well have been created around the time of the original photograph sitting, by the same studio; alternatively an existing photograph could be enlarged at any time afterwards, by the same or another photographer. Either way, enlargements weren’t usually printed with the studio details, so they often lack useful evidence and we don’t know where they were produced.
When photographs were enlarged, typically some of the finer pictorial detail was lost and so they were generally retouched by hand, using watercolour paint (or other media, such as charcoal): this was thought to enhance the picture and generally create a more lifelike portrait. Sometimes artistically-inclined studio hands carried out the painting in-house; other photographic studios outsourced the work to a local professional artist, providing written instructions about hair, eye and garment colours. An accomplished artist could create a pleasing, subtly-enhanced image based on the enlarged photograph, but sometimes the painting was heavy and clumsy, or, as you remark, can result in some strange-looking details.