Playing With Pictures:
The Art of Victorian Photocollage
(Victorian Photocollage Exhibit Web Page)
October 10, 2009 to January 3, 2010

At
The Art Institute of Chicago
(Art Institute of Chicago Website)
100 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603
312.443.3626

Susan Weinrebe
November 6, 2009

Those Victorians were wild and wacky folks. When they weren’t adding steel to their corset stays or covering piano legs with fabric to disguise those naughty limbs, they were devising ways to entertain themselves and the friends who came to call. We are, of course, talking about the upper crust of British society, those women with an abundance of time, appropriate training in such lady-like endeavors as drawing and water color, and a plethora of wit likely submerged to the conventions of their time.

Playing with Pictures is a collection of fifteen albums in which the photographs of friends taken from their cartes des visites were used to create bizarre, humorous, satiric and surreal scenes drawn from the imaginations of the album’s creator. Intricately coifed heads of female friends and lavishly bewhiskered heads of males might replace the heads of tortoises in one hand-drawn scene. A street scape might feature scores of full figure cut-outs amusingly portraying the collagist’s intimates as animals, village folk or vendors. The degree of humor and fun was limited only by the artist’s imagination and artistic ability.

Not only is this delicious exhibit intriguing in its own right (imagine leafing through a friend’s collage album to see one wickedly hilarious send up after another of your mutual circle), it is also a chronicle of well-bred British Victorians and their ways.

Before seeing the new show, Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago upstairs, Playing with Pictures, makes an excellent first stop. It delivers full Victoriana flavor and establishes a sense of the esthetic that propelled Arts and Crafts in the opposite direction.

Not without future influences, a quick screening of some episodes of Monty Python, will show how those wacky and wonderful humorists of the 1980’s used similarly surreal juxtapositions in the animated interludes of their television program. Playing with Pictures Victorian is a humorous and poignant perspective of the Victorian art of photocollage and the lives of the women who created the albums.

Victoria Alexandrina
Anderson-Pelham
Countess of Yarborough
(English 1840–?)
& Eva Macdonald
(English 1846/50–?)
“Mixed Pickles,”
from the Westmorland
Album, 1864/70
Collage, watercolor-
albumen prints
Courtesy J. Paul Getty Mus.
Los Angeles

---

Eva Macdonald
(English 1846/50–?)
“What Are Trumps?”
from the Westmorland
Album 1869
Collage, watercolor
and albumen prints
Courtesy J. Paul Getty Mus.
Los Angeles

---

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, 1872/77
Collage, watercolor-albumen prints
Courtesy George Eastman House
International Mus. Photog. & Film

---

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, watercolor-albumen prints
Courtesy George Eastman House
International Mus. Photog. & Film

---

For more information, contact Dr. Roberta E. Zlokower at zlokower@bestweb.net