Domestic Idylls: Clementina, Lady Hawarden
19th Century Photography from the V&A

Clementina, Lady Hawarden (1822-1865) was one of the pioneer women of photography. It is thought that she took up photography in 1857, making landscapes and figure studies at the family estate in Dundrum, Ireland. However, her primary subjects were her daughters, whom she carefully posed in the rooms of her London home to produce studies of mood, ambience and sensuality. These enchanting images explore an intimate world of Victorian womanhood.

Hawarden’s achievements were acclaimed in her life-time by her contemporaries, such as Lewis Carroll. She experimented with composition and light with a freedom denied to professional portrait photographers. Reviewing her work in 1865, a critic for the Photographic News noted: “These pictures...are so full of grace and beauty, so original in their style, so perfect in their photographic delicacy and excellence...” She exhibited her photographs with the most open of titles – simply: ‘Photographic Studies’ or ‘Studies from Life’, leaving the viewer to guess at the implied narrative in the theatrical scenes, or ‘tableaux’, acted out by her children, dressed in a variety of costumes for the part.

After her early death at the age of forty-three, Hawarden’s work fell into obscurity until relatively recently. The majority of her photographs in existence were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum by her descendants in 1939. At some time before entering the Museum collections, the prints were removed from a support, possibly the pages of an album, resulting in their distinctive torn or trimmed corners. The photographs are all ‘vintage’ albumen prints from wet collodion negatives and were taken and printed between 1857 and 1864. Today, they are recognised as one of the finest treasures of the Museum’s collections and among the most intriguing images in the history of photography.

Martin Barnes
Curator, Photographs
Victoria and Albert Museum


Exhibition organised by the V&A, London