Delightful collection of Victorian photomontages, circa 1870s
 
In 2010 the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted the exhibition “Playing with pictures: the art of Victorian photocollage”.
 
The introductory text to the exhibition read: “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. 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 features forty-eight works from the 1860s and 1870s, from public and private collections.”
 
Here I am offering a collection of 18 Victorian whimsical photocollages. Some are collages of photographs and pen & ink drawings; others consist of photographs and prints from popular Victorian magazines. A wonderful collection!
 
They seem to consist of images of a single family; some portraits return time and time again.
Although the album pages are a bit brittle and the images sometimes low in contrast, they are overall in good condition.
 
Albumen prints mounted on 18 album pages. Prints of varying dimensions.