Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Albumen Portraits from the Nineteenth Century

James Good Tunny
Portrait of James Warburton Begbie, physician and author
ca. 1855
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Camille Silvy
Carte-de-visite portrait of an unknown woman
ca. 1860-70
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Portrait

She has no need to fear the fall
Of harvest from the laddered reach
Of orchards, nor the tide gone ebbing
        From the steep beach.

Nor hold to pain's effrontery
Her body's bulwark, stern and savage,
Nor be a glass, where to forsee
        Another's ravage.

What she has gathered, and what lost,
She will not find to lose again.
She is possessed by time, who once
        Was loved by men.

– Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

Anonymous photographer
Carte-de-visite portrait of Princess Alice
second daughter of Queen Victoria

1861
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Thomas Rodger
Portrait of an unknown boy
ca. 1861
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Victor Albert Prout
Portrait of Lady Anne Duff
1863
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Victor Albert Prout
Portrait of Miss Stapleton, out walking
1863
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

To a Print of Queen Victoria

I advise rest; the farmhouse
we dug you up in has been
modernized, and the people
who hung you as their ikon
against the long passage wall
are underground – Incubus

and excellent woman, we
inherit the bone acre
of your cages and laws. This
dull green land suckled at your
blood's frigor Angelicanus,
crowning with a housewife's tally

the void of Empire, does not
remember you – and certain
bloody bandaged ghosts rising
from holes of Armageddon
at Gallipoli or Sling
Camp, would like to fire a shot

through the gilt frame. I advise
rest, Madam; and yet the tomb
holds much that we must travel
barely without. Your print – 'from
an original pencil
drawing by the Marchioness

of Granby, March, eighteen nine-
ty seven . . .' Little mouth, strong
nose and hooded eye – they speak
of half-truths my type have slung
out of the window, and lack
and feel the lack too late. Queen,

you stand most for the time of
early light, clay roads, great trees
unfelled, and the smoke from huts
where girls in sack dresses
stole butter . . . The small rain spits
today. You smile in your grave.

– James K. Baxter (1926-1972)

William Carrick and John MacGregor
Portrait of Jessie Carrick (photographer's mother)
ca. 1860
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

William Carrick and John MacGregor
Portrait of Jessie Carrick (photographer's sister)
ca. 1860
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

William Carrick and John MacGregor
William Carrick, his mother, his brother George and sister Jessie
ca. 1860
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

William Carrick and John MacGregor
William Carrick, his mother, his brother George and sister Jessie
ca. 1860
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Self-Portrait, 1969

He's still young –; thirty, but looks younger –
or does he? . . . In the eyes and cheeks, tonight,
turning in the mirror, he saw his mother, –
puffy; angry; bewildered . . . Many nights
now, when he stares there, he gets angry: –
something unfulfilled there, something dead
to what he once thought he surely could be –
Now, just the glamour of habits . . .
                                                                   Once,
     instead,
he thought insight would remake him, he'd reach
– what?  The thrill, the exhilaration
unravelling disaster, that seemed to teach
necessary knowledge . . . became just jargon.

Sick of being decent, he craves another
crash. What reaches him except disaster?

– Frank Bidart

Anonymous photographer
Dr K.M. Downie
1870
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Anonymous photographer
Mr Hackett and John Clark, Hyères
1875
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

James Esson
Self-portrait
ca. 1880
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

James Cox
Portrait of Maud Thomson at Invertrossachs
1881
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Anonymous photographer
Jessie Marion King (Mrs Ernest Archibald Taylor) in a field
ca. 1895
albumen print
National Galleries of Scotland

Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)