Lady clementina hawarden biography of william hill
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The first fashion photographer: Clementina, Lady Hawarden
I first came across this photograph in a history of 19th century costume. It’s been widely published in print and online so you may well be familiar with it.
The author in that book said that the woman on the right has been posed with the crinoline of her dress removed to fit into the picture. My immediate thought was that this was incorrect. In the first place there is clearly plenty of room for a full crinoline, and more importantly while Isabella Hawarden is wearing a conventional day dress her sister Florence is wearing some kind of fancy dress or teatralisk costume around which a del av helhet of white material has been draped in a way which echoes the shape of Isabella’s dress. Take a closer look.
I think you can see the same piece of material in this photograph:
That’s their sister Clementina sitting at the window with the same material draped around her. You’ll see it igen in other pictures.
But before we g
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Winter: My Secret
By Christina Rossetti
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you’re too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell.
Clementina Hawarden's Victorian era photographs have been described as, 'erotic' and 'sensuous'because she posed her daughters in what was thought to be 'intimate' poses. She used a closet as her darkroom in her South Kensington home in London, England. She transformed the first floor of her home into a studio where,
'She disappears underneath the photographer’s black cloth, which is one with her own dark dress, as if a layer of her voluminous skirt has been pulled up and over her head. Her delicate hands, white and stained with photographic chemicals, protrude as they adjust the knobs that control the accordionlike bellows of her wooden camera. The mother tilts and focuses the ima
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It is unknown why Hawarden decided to become a photographer, a laborious and messy pursuit that would have been an unusual undertaking for a woman of rank. Nor is it known when exactly Hawarden began taking photographs, or how she learned the complicated wet collodion process she preferred, but as Dodier notes, “the speed with which she became proficient is impressive.”[^7] The earliest surviving images are from 1857, taken at Dundrum House, the family’s estate in Ireland. Hawarden’s husband inherited Dundrum when he assumed his title in October 1856, making the couple some of the wealthiest landowners in the British Isles and drastically altering their financial circumstances. Dundrum features significantly in her early works: Hawarden took stereoscopic photographs of the landscape around the estate, perhaps suggesting an early interest in the medium's doubling effect that would define her mature art. Her early figural photography had an unsurprisingly amateurish quality, showi