Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage

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 in the 1850s and 1860s. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, ... Read more

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 in the 1850s and 1860s. 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 will feature approximately 55 works from public and private collections.