Category: Edwardian

Categories
Edwardian photography

Another Mystery Woman

Three photographs that are a bit of a mystery. They are large prints 8″ by 10″. The woman is elaborately dressed and the backdrop sumptuously rendered. A series of letters and numbers in the corner of each shot gives no clue. They are all backed by black rice paper to which they have been glued, so from an album without any information on the back that can be recovered. I’ve only seen photos stuck to this kind of paper when they are of some age. My guess is that these were taken in the Edwardian era but I could be completely wrong.

Of course this is typical of many old photographs. Working out when they were taken is often a matter of guesswork. These three are silver gelatin prints which again points to early twentieth century but silver gelatin prints are still produced today although much less frequently.

Categories
Dance Edwardian

Vintage Dancing Girls: Dance Poses

I recently acquired a set of 20+ photographs of girls in dance poses. I assume these were taken to illustrate to other dancers the basic poses. The size of the photos is 2 inches by 3 inches and the quality is not great. There’s no information to show who the dancers were, who the photographer was or at what date they were taken. My guess is they date back to the Edwardian era. More poses from this series are shown below.

I would further speculate that these poses were influenced by Isadora Duncan and her followers as she often performed barefoot and in a short tunic.

This photo is larger and from a different source but you can see the same posing ideas being put into practice.

And here’s another set of dancers barefoot and in tunics.

And a solo dancer striking a pose. Once you start looking you will find many dancers who all seem to be working from the same templates.

Categories
Edwardian photography Social history

A typical morning at Home

I’ve always got several projects on the go. These postcards of a ballerina were dated September 1914 at Bexhill-on-Sea. They’re the latest addition to my collection of vintage dancing girls, a project running for over 10 years now and amounting to 563 entries. My recent article on this collection in the British Music Hall Society‘s magazine only scratched the surface and there’s much more to come.

I’m still experimenting with pictorialism as a style so here’s the view through the gate and down the lane.

Speaking of views from the house here’s a recent sunset. From the front of the house I look west over the local quarry and there are often spectacular sunsets.

All sorts of ephemera turn up when collecting old photographs, like this knitting pattern. I have a theory that these old patterns will become ever more collectable, not for the patterns themselves but for the photographs on the covers. The amount of activity around knitting patterns on Ebay seems to support this idea.

After a hard morning processing scans and photographs it’s time to relax in the garden and here’s Gnasher finding some shade.

And here’s two of our local squirrels cleaning up seeds that have fallen from the bird feeder.

It’s a hard life!

Categories
Edwardian photography Social history

Family Life

There must be zillions of family photographs in the world. Here are a few from my collection.

As you can imagine families featuring military personnel abound from both world wars and we can only guess whether they all survived the conflicts. In the second of these photographs you can see the man with a pipe in the upper left has been cut out of another photo and pasted in. Was he someone lost from the family?

This one was dated 29th Nov 1916. The message on the reverse is in German and addressed to a family in the Netherlands.

Days out at the seaside is a popular theme.

This good-looking bunch are almost too good to be true. Are they performers of some type?

I know families used to be much bigger but I’m not sure these are all from the same family.

The photographer looks like M Hotz of Honfleur. This photograph is much larger than a standard cabinet card.

Another plus sized card but no information on the photographer or the family.

Categories
Edwardian photography Social history

Gladys Cooper the first postcard superstar

According to Sheridan Morley, one of Gladys’ grandchildren, in his biography of her over 400 different postcards of her were produced between 1905 and 1920. Each postcard would have had many thousands of reprints. You can get an idea of her popularity and longevity as a celebrity by looking on ebay. When I checked today there were 1700 listings for postcards of Gladys and I would expect to see similar numbers on any day of the week.

You can find postcards of Gladys in black and white, colour, hand tinted. partially tinted, on greetings cards and so on. Often her distinctive signature is shown on the cards.

This pair of postcards are indicative of the many variations of postcards that were produced. She’s wearing exactly the same clothes in both but the colouring and orientation have been changed.

Gladys was often photographed with her children. Here she is with daughter Joan. Note Joan’s signature on the right hand photo though I doubt her handwriting was so similar to her mother’s.

Postcards were only a sideline for Gladys. She was an actress appearing in many stage plays from the 1920s and later had a career as a film actress. You can see her in Hitchcock’s Rebecca for instance.

If you want to see more Gladys Cooper postcards you’ll find them with a simple online search. My own modest collection can be seen here.