I. Silver, mercury, and ink
The past is evasive, even when it’s our own. You will not get a clear image of the past by staring straight at it. It will always be ambiguous at best. Trying to put these faraway moments of your personal prehistory into focus requires the same effort as looking at a daguerreotype. It requires skill, patience, and a healthy measure of mental flexibility.
Looking at a daguerreotype, you have to find that sweet spot from where you can see the image in all its clarity, detail, and vividness. You have to establish a perfect viewing angle. As you are moving your head from left to right to find that elusive point in space, the image you see on the metallic surface will switch from positive to negative.
The image is at its clearest when a black surface — like a black velvet curtain — is suspended behind you. It absorbs the unwanted reflections from the shiny surface and this brings out the image. Black velvet would indeed be perfect, optically as well as rhetorically, since it transitions neatly into the metaphors that follow.
Entering the realm of family history is like stepping into a dark room, hoping to catch glimpses of the faint, silvery specters of the people populating the past. They have no substance and populate a landscape that has in itself become a ghost, an ectoplasm, a panorama suspended in the oily shadows of weathered photographs and sepia-tinted postcards.
This past is a world that continues to exist. It exists behind your back as time is slipping away, with scenes steeped in the theatrical blackness of countless funeral corteges. Where black carriages slowly roll through the empty streets of the towns and villages your ancestors lived in. It is also in front of you, captured and frozen in historic photographs and documents. An ethereal moment imprisoned in an unimaginably thin layer of silver and mercury atoms or faded ink.
Looking at a daguerreotype requires light as well as darkness to distinguish anything at all. The result will be joyous and painful at the same time.
Images on historic photographs which have survived the ravaging effects of time possess an eerie clarity that gives the subjects a near-physical presence. A presence that is absent from most modern photographs. Ghosts materialize at arm’s length, as if you could touch the people on the plates across the decades that separate them from us. Much of this uncanny sensation is due to the fact that the image is captured in silver atoms instead of pixels. In a sense, these images, built from infinitely small units, have a resolution that matches reality itself.
Yet there is more. To obtain a sharp image, the subject of a portrait had to remain perfectly still for several minutes. It is as if the essence of the time that passed during the creation of the image has been bundled with it. It is as if the daguerreotype not only shows a subject at face value but reinforces this image with an additional dimension — an encapsulated and quintessential fragment of a reality that lives on behind the veil of precious metal atoms and time past. This is why these images can have such an unsettling effect on the viewer.
But, having shaken off that annoying sense of apprehension, it is rewarding to break through the veil and see what’s behind. To step through the night of times.
II. Globetrotting dressmaker
This story pivots on two nineteenth-century engravings taken from two exceptionally large books that, many years ago, belonged to my great-aunt and, after some wandering around, are now part of my own library.
With exceptionally large, I mean ENORMOUS, because they measure 68 x 50 x 10 cm (26.77 x 19.69 x 3.9 in). The cover-boards are made of heavy pressed cardboard and nearly 1 cm (0.39 in) thick.
The volumes are unbelievably heavy. I can only move one at a time, and only a weightlifter could lift one volume above his head. Putting one on the top shelf of a bookcase is physically impossible without the help of another person. And it would be a futile exercise anyway, because no common bookshelf is large and strong enough to hold such a massive book.
The best way to describe these oversize books, which I did in the title, is by using the adjective ‘gargantuan’, a deliciously literary word derived from the title of one of the works of François Rabelais (1494–1553), describing the vicissitudes of the eponymous giant. Why? Well, because ‘huge’, ‘enormous’, and ‘gigantic’ simply aren’t gargantuan enough.
Before I explore the details, I must tell you something about the person who acquired them and kept them in her penumbral apartment before they started to move around and ended up in my library.
At some point in time, these outrageously large books were picked up by my great-aunt in some bookstore, brocante, or antiques auction. Probably in Schotland, but there is no one left in my family with sufficient knowledge of her goings-on to verify this assumption. I think it was Schotland, because I remember my mother telling stories about her aunt, stories in which she traveled to various destinations by boat. This must have been shortly after the war.
How she shipped them back home remains a mystery. They aren’t the usual airport paperbacks one puts casually into one’s inside pocket. She either shipped them separately or hired someone to bring them along.
Although the stories circulating of my great-aunt’s globetrotting were always colored with a sense of pride, envy even, the stories were also told with a whiff of semi-embarrassment. Perhaps this was because, among the discoveries and bric-à-brac she brought home from her travels, there also was the occasional ‘new uncle’. These uncles, however, never lasted and were eventually permanently relieved from duty by another ‘aunt’ who stayed around long enough for me to have known her as the kind aunt Riek who somehow always materialized in the company of Aunt Annie.
Aunt Annie, her full name was Antje Maria Leerdam, was a dressmaker; we would perhaps use the label ‘fashion designer’ now. Well, she may never have been a household name, but she was important enough in certain strata of society to become a supplier to the circle around the royal court. There is no evidence that she ever created something for the two queens that reigned during her lifetime, Wilhelmina and Juliana, but it is an undisputed fact that she created dresses for the ambiance of the court, the ladies in waiting, other high female functionaries, and members of the aristocracy that gravitated around The Hague.
Both my mother and her sister told me stories about their eccentric aunt Annie, seated in her workshop, ‘The Atelier’, pinning together cut pieces of cloth while two young women, referred to as ‘the girls’, sewed together the pieces on large sewing machines. The workshop was an indescribable mess and always filled with smoke. Poor seamstresses.
According to my mother’s sister, Aunt Annie wielded a huge pair of scissors and cut pieces of cloth without so much as referring to a drawing. She worked simply on sight with the utmost flair and accuracy.
Women from the upper classes did come and go, not talking of Michelangelo, but braving two narrow flights of stairs and an almost solid cloud of cigarette smoke. It must have provided her with a higher-than-average income and a certain freedom to go out and about, travel, and buy stuff. She traveled mostly by ship. Not using regular ferries but as a paying passenger on freighters. She simply booked a hut and went off. I like the image of this strange globetrotting dressmaker who acquired the mysterious books and had them delivered to her somber flat in The Hague.
When she wasn’t crossing the seas as a paying passenger on cargo ships, picking up handsome seamen in the process, she frequented jazz bars, nightclubs, and cabarets. Her nephew, my uncle from my mother’s side, was at the time a student of economics at what now is called the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He continued to live with his parents, my grandparents, not very far from his aunt’s flat. It was she who initiated him and introduced him to this artistic post-war world of clubs, music, and art. The art and music scene of The Hague was highly cosmopolitan and eclectic, ranging from the jazz singer Pia Beck to Georges Brassens and to the Hungarian Lajos Veres, the father of the famous singer Mariska Veres of the band “Shocking Blue”.
This extraordinary education may have contributed to him growing into the role of a clear-minded, soft-spoken, and rather suave captain of industry. Later in his career, as director of ESSO’s tanker division in the Netherlands, he would himself be frequenting elite society. Probably feeling relatively at ease, having received this particular kind of non-formal from his aunt, which may have helped him more than his degree in economics.
Aunt Annie (I never called her ‘great-aunt’) entered my consciousness when I was still a child. She was already aging, probably traveled less, and was always in the company of her ‘lady friend’ Riek. Her home was the center of family gatherings on a regular basis.
A timid schoolboy, I mostly tried to escape discretely from the center of these intense and smoky family gatherings in her boudoir by hiding in a shadowy corner of the hall, next to the room where all the fun was, and slowly turning the large pages of these gigantic books which were lying flat on the floor because no bookcase was big enough to carry them. By pretending to be fully absorbed in the images, I managed to make myself invisible. At least, so I thought.
The decor of the room was oppressive. Ominous cabinets filled the walls of the dimly lit space. Large pieces of baroque-revival furniture made navigating through the room a hazardous endeavor. The sense of imminent death-by-decoration was aggravated by frightening paintings of big nude women that seemed ready and eager to leap off the walls to smother you with their breasts. The mix of tobacco smoke-saturated air, dark wood, heavy draperies, and carpets was asphyxiating and lethal. At least, in my immature eyes. The adults didn’t seem to be bothered at all. They appeared to have a marvelous time.
Traditionally, these gatherings happened on the first of January. I remember the weather on that day as invariably gloomy, no matter which year. Without exception, during the afternoons of all the January 1sts, the approaching night wrapped its dark, wet wings around the receding day like a cold shroud found in a morass pond. The objects in the streets slowly dissolved and became invisible, except for some dimly lit patches of wall, pavement, and cars. In my memory, groups of crows populated the bare branches of the trees, huddled together in melancholy gatherings resembling the black silhouettes of pall-bearers waiting in front of a cemetery gate.
It may be that my memory is somewhat distorted by the fact that it was around that time my oldest cousin recommended me to read the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which I did. It was a revelation but had the predictable side-effect that everything around me appeared bleak, melancholic, and miserable for weeks. A young child’s mind is not fully equipped to handle these moody narratives. Although I liked the Dupin stories for their cleverness and couleur locale.
Of course, we were always the last to arrive at my great-aunt’s house. My father delayed our departure until my mother lost her temper, and our car invariably pulled into the sombre street after nightfall. I hated this because it meant we would have to enter a room that was already filled with people. People that had had the opportunity to find the best and most strategic places to sit. Obviously, etiquette dictated that I, the newly arrived, had to make the tour, braving stale smoke and alcohol breath, politely shaking hands, making sure not to knock over cups and glasses as I shuffled past the salon tables filled with small dabs of smelly paté de foie gras and other unspeakable substances that looked like coagulated vomit, smiling stupidly while trying to avoid being kissed, and looking confident and completely at ease.
As we walked to the building, I imagined ghoulish entities hiding in the recesses of the porches of the pre-war houses we passed. Everything in that street was somber, dreary, and black. Still, I would rather have stayed outside and faced the ghouls than make that dreaded entrance into a room full of people, judging, cigarettes dangling from their curved fingers.
III. Cigarettes in long drink glasses
I vividly remember one of these evenings. The room was, as usual, filled with aunts, uncles, my grandmother, great-aunt Annie, her female companion, my cousins, and some nondescript friends. As I retired to my distant corner, my rib-cage hurt, and I thought I would not live to see the end of that dreadful evening. The pain in my chest was probably just an unhappy mixture of growing pains, melancholy, and lack of oxygen. What did I know? It was the sixties, and so, the adults were chain-smoking and drinking at a steady pace. Cigarettes and ashtrays were everywhere. It was the era of long-drink glasses filled with bundles of cigarettes strategically positioned on every table. Even on TV, talk show hosts and their guests smoked incessantly. Writers and intellectuals were arguing on the small black-and-white screen shrouded in smoke, brandishing their cigarettes like toy weapons, or holding them like Wendy in ‘The Shining’. The big crackdown on smoking was still years away.
My great-aunt’s home was a celebration of smoking. Burn holes riddled the worn leather armrests of the club chairs and the thick oriental carpets that covered the sofas. She stoically confessed to smoking in bed too. A remark which sparked a witty reply from one of my uncles:
“You shouldn’t do that, auntie, because one of these days, when you wake up, you may find yourself dead.”
In my hideout, I inaudibly chuckled.
Aunt Annie, having an observant eye, noticed my interest in the books and their engravings –I didn’t know what they were back then– and loudly declared:
“Aha! The boy likes the books. He likes art, unlike his father, who is a Philistine. So, I tell you all here and now — when I’m dead, he’ll have them!” Having no experience with grandiose gestures of this type at all, I had no idea what the best response could be, so I grinned stupidly and was mumbling something resembling a ‘thank you’.
Years later, when I was living and studying in Leiden, she died. I remember receiving the phone call. I rented a room in an 18th-century house on one of the old, narrow canals of the town. On the other side of the dark and still water was a coffin factory. The backside of the factory had doors on wheels that were often ajar, and one could not help but see the melancholy interior with the coffins standing and lying around, as if they amused themselves while waiting for their future occupants. Recently I saw a movie, a birthday present from my daughter. It was F.W. Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu — Eine Symphonie des Grauens’ (1922), a silent movie accompanied by live music. The images of Count Orlok, the vampire, walking around with his coffin under his arm, threw me right back into this segment of my past. The phone call didn’t make a big impression because I hadn’t seen great-aunt-aunt Annie for a while. My mother had got into a rather difficult relationship with her because she weaponized her last will and testament, which annoyed my mother.
The bequest seemed to be forgotten by everyone. At that time, I didn’t know where the books had gone, although I did know that one of my cousins, a rather weak personality, had inherited most of her belongings. Many valuable objects had been hijacked by a boyfriend of his sister. This was a bus driver who knew the ‘right people’ to deal with the bulk of the objects that had to be somehow disposed of. I never managed to create a full account of what that man basically stole and sold to his shady friends.
Much later, I learnt that my cousin somehow managed to hold on to the books, which he kept for years until he decided it was time to hand them over to me. Partly because he needed the space, living in a tiny apartment in Amsterdam. The books are battered and damaged. Especially the bindings, but the engravings are still in very good condition. Once in a while, when I have some idle time and feel like it, I make a rig to securely hold the books and make photos of the engravings.
Great-aunt Annie is long gone now. Memories have faded. Other people have gone. Documents have disappeared. My parents have left the Earth, as have my grandparents and most other people I could turn to for information and stories of that time.
Important witnesses have disappeared. I find myself in the position of the historian who just comes to realize that he should have approached his sources much sooner. My only living aunt is now also my only source of information. The older cousin who had much more direct contact with her and inherited her stuff when he was young is now suffering from a plethora of mental issues and is virtually unapproachable. Family history can be constructed around objects, photographs, documents, but like with any other kind of history, without context, without explanation, it becomes speculation, much like archaeology.
As a child, I had little or no idea how strange, and how uniquely unconventional this great-aunt really was, given the slice of history and the social environment in which she lived. To me, she and her lifelong companion were a natural given. I never questioned their visits as ‘aunt Annie’ and ‘aunt Riek’. Most adults referred to them briefly as ‘aunt Annie and Riek’, but for me, adding the prefix ‘aunt’ to Riek sounded more logical and genuine. Since these aunts were already there at the time I became a sentient human being, it never occurred to me how extraordinary and how far ahead they actually were.
Very late in her life, my mother confided in me that she always took the presence of aunt Riek for granted, but that she had no concept of lesbian couples, or even knew that women could have same sex relationships. Aunt Riek was simply there. She was accepted and much liked, but her relationship with aunt Annie was never discussed.
Discovering this fragmented part of my family history goes hand in hand with a celebration of the clandestine way these women brought art into my life, and have indirectly contributed to me becoming who I am.
The images I selected from the precious volumes for this historical note, pretty as they are, can only be infused with life if I put them in the right context. Which is to say, if I manage to revive my great-aunt with the help of my own fragmentary childhood memories and the information sourced from my remaining family members.
Aunt Riek was an intelligent and lovely woman. When I was in the fourth grade of secondary school, she started to sent me magazines and weekly newspapers, mostly with their wrappers intact. At first, most of the content of these publications went over my head, but gradually I got used to reading the opinion articles, essays and pieces of investigative journalism. Her choice was quite eclectic, and covered the full with of the political spectrum. Years later, when I was a student, one of the authors I admired above all others became my neighbor. Sheer, happy, coincidence.
IV. Citroën Traction Avant
Describing my great-aunt as an eccentric, or, as the Germans would call it, ‘ein Original’, would be an understatement. Of course, she was a lifelong bachelor, or ‘spinster’, as was the moderately pejorative term commonly used back then. She smoked like a dockhand, had the voice of a drill sergeant, and the manners of a private eye of the Dashiell Hammett variety. Yet she was of short stature, negating the manly qualities of her voice, behavior, and her larger-than-life personality.
Her bulldog face and — according to my mother’s sister — ‘angel-hair’ were yet another pair of conflicting properties. This weird cocktail of qualities made her into an interesting phenomenon, a force of nature that could be as unsettling to people as a solar eclipse is to animals. To me, by contrast, she was nothing but extraordinarily kind.
My father belonged to that specific group of individuals on which Aunt Annie had an unsettling influence. The effect of her presence on him was, as far as I can remember, always immediate and invariably negative. As soon as she appeared at a family gathering, he would start making snarky remarks under his breath. Usually, he complained about her being late — which may have been true because she often got lost in the sprawling suburbs of The Hague — and her depositing cigarette ash in the sugar bowls, or being rude as well as ugly. Why he took offense at her being late, I don’t know because as far as I could see, her absence from a party, to him, would be a positive outcome. I think the sheer fact of being late in itself offended him, as being late was, in some circles at least, a sure sign of indecency and dubious morals.
Born into the narrow-mindedness of a Calvinist background, my father clearly disapproved of my great-aunt’s flamboyant lifestyle and personality. This most certainly was the fruit of his traditional upbringing. His father, my granddad, had an unremarkable career. He worked as a railroad employee, probably a so-called ‘points-man’, or ‘switchman’ in the small university town of Leiden and, after a divorce (I found proof of this previous marriage in the genealogical databases that are freely available on the web), somehow ended up as a coal and tobacco shop owner in Rotterdam. When both his town and his livelihood were destroyed by the German bombing raids at the start of World War II, he moved to The Hague. I uncovered records of him being a minor civil servant in that town, where he and my grandmother must have moved soon after the beginning of the war, but I don’t have enough information to create a reliable timeline.
My paternal grandparents displayed all the characteristics of insignificant people, including a deep-rooted dislike for originality, authenticity, and exuberance. With these properties come a certain disrespect for authority and status quo, which, to them, would be unconscionable.
Although she was the aunt of his girlfriend, who would later become my mother, he avoided contact with this — in his eyes — natural phenomenon all his life. Not very successfully, I may add. Great-aunt Annie was one of the few single women in The Hague to own a car during the reconstruction years after World War II. And this made her a rather spectacular appearance on these post-war streets.
It happened one day that my father, who was cycling from his home in the centre to visit his fiancée in the neighboring village, and Annie, seated at the impressive steering wheel of her black Citroën Traction Avant, crossed paths. My father, startled, at first pretended not to see her and quietly tried to cycle away. But seconds later he heard a volley of ominous honks from the car behind him and a familiar booming voice calling him by his nickname: ‘JOOP! JOOOP!’
He told me many years later that he wished the earth had opened underneath his bicycle and swallowed him there and then. An image which came back to me a few years ago when we lowered his coffin into his grave.
The fact that this incident occurred in an area of stately houses and a small park in the border area between The Hague and Rijswijk aggravated the damaging effect of aunt Annie addressing him in public. In his imagination, every person of any importance living in that area now knew that he was somehow associated with this outrageous woman. Of course, he was wrong. Nobody noticed and nobody cared. And she was neither crazy nor dreadful or outrageous, only thoroughly authentic. More importantly, she didn’t give a hoot about what people thought.
Had you, the reader of this text, met her, you would probably never have guessed that she was a high-end dressmaker. Her somber –but not necessarily humble– abode was on the edge of The Hague and Rijswijk. Since both the royal court and government reside in The Hague, this elegant town at the North Sea coast is the seat of the Dutch government and the ‘de facto’ capital of the Netherlands (whereas the geographical capital of the country is Amsterdam). The Hague started as a medieval stronghold where the counts of Holland had their court and evolved into an important provincial center. During the nineteenth century, it had grown into a stylish town. This is still apparent today, although the town’s heart was severely damaged during World War II, with German bombs hitting the stylish neoclassical living quarters surrounding the center. Over time, during the second half of the twentieth century, it absorbed some of its neighboring villages and grew into a sprawling metropolitan area, a veritable ‘ville tentaculaire’.
Aunt Annie lived in a predominantly pre-war quarter of Rijswijk. The area between the town and the village was dominated by large country estates, conveniently placed on The Hague’s doorstep. At its center, Rijswijk had a small nuclear village, surrounded by an extended zone of small farms, mostly livestock, because the soil was unfit for agriculture. (If you are English-speaking, you might sense a similarity between the name of the town Rijswijk and that of the Icelandic capital Reykjavik. This is mere coincidence. The pronunciation, however, is very much alike.)
V. A painfully slow affair
Now let’s talk about the books and the engravings they contain. Engravings like the ones in the books are currently not en vogue, so selling them is not an option. It never was, because I like them too much. As I wrote earlier, the volumes are so heavy that handling them is almost impossible. It is that exaggerated size and the story that is connected to them that gives them value and meaning to me. Getting close to these pages with a magnifying glass, I still perceive a whiff of stale smoke, wine, and gin, which, like a Proustian reflex, immediately transports me back to those gloomy days in the early seventies.
Reproducing images and art in the era before photography, digital photography, and scanners was a painfully slow affair. That is, if your aim was to produce images that closely resembled the original in quality and style. At university, I followed a semester on the history and techniques of graphic arts in our university’s famous prints collection. I became fascinated by the concept of reproduction graphic. A phenomenon that flourished in the 19th century slightly before the invention of photography and only gradually replaced by photography and lithography, which was a more versatile and economically viable technique..
Suppose you had a swiftly brushed painting of a vase with flowers, and you wanted to reproduce it for a book or publish it as a separate print. You would bring it to a graphic artist who would painstakingly copy the work on a steel plate. At first sight, these steel engravings look like engravings on copper or etchings, but they are quite different. They are more precise, meticulously mimicking the nuances and brushwork of the original.
Working through these images reminded me of something, but at that time the books of Aunt Annie were deeply buried in my subconscious. Looking at the images of reproduction graphics in the books we were supposed to study, and at real examples in the collection of our institute brought back memories that lay hidden deep in my subconscious.
The lines are incredibly regular and thin. The artist faithfully rendered every nuance. A Bohemian swirly flower vase would take the painter less time to produce than this graphical artist to reproduce.
The tools used to create the images were specially designed to create the grooves, lines, and indents necessary for allowing the plates to be inked, and included little comb-like engraving tools, spiked wheels (‘rouleaux’), and ruling machines.
If you look at these engravings, you might be put off by a certain mechanical stiffness initially, but upon closer inspection, you cannot but marvel at the incredible skill of the reproduction artists. These people were like human scanners. This portrait of a painting in the Royal Collection, Osbourne, proves that the freshness of the original can be transferred to a work of great clarity.
These images differ from artists’ engravings, such as Rembrandt’s dry point engravings or his etchings, or other deliberate artistic creations. The job of these skilled engravers was not to be original or to create something new, but to faithfully translate an existing work of art into an entirely different medium. In this respect, they deserve our deepest respect and highest esteem.
These are some examples of images taken from the two volumes of steel engravings, commissioned by the firm P. & D. Colnaghi Co. between 1854 and 1860. Samuel Carter Hall (1800–1889) wrote the descriptions accompanying the engravings. The full title of the work is: “The Royal Gallery of Art, Ancient and Modern engravings from the private collections of Her Majesty the Queen and His Royal Highness Prince Albert and the art heirlooms of The Crown, at Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and Osborne”.
The engravings were published as a series and sold by subscription. The original size, 66.5 x 49 cm), is called ‘quarto grand eagle’. The bound volumes contain the prints in their full original size, hence the impressive size of the books.
After approximately 400 impressions, the steel plates were cut down, and another run was produced to be published in the Art-Journal.
VI. Victoria and Albert
The author of the descriptions, S. C. Hall, was, according to the sources I found, a rather contentious figure. Trained as a lawyer, he somehow ended up as a publisher and art journalist. Creating series like this was the only way to make the private collection of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert available to a wider audience. The engravers were admitted to the palaces where the royal art collection was kept for as long as they needed to produce their copies.
Photography already existed, but the technique was still in its infancy, and the cheap production of extended series of copies for an acceptable price was not yet possible. During the 19th century, steel engraving was the preferred visual technique for prints that had no artistic intention as such but were meant to faithfully reproduce an existing original.
Due to the subjects depicted and the way they are rendered, these engravings now have something distinctly old-fashioned about them. They don’t fetch high prices at online auctions, and they linger in the display cases of antiquarian bookshops. But look at these wonderful details and beware! You might develop an appetite for these neglected works of graphic art.
When one spends some time examining the prints up close, one will discover the traces of mechanical tools used to cover larger areas with tonal values. If you compare the engraving with the original, you see that it isn’t a mechanical reproduction but an interpretation.
VII. A lovely child’s head
We are fortunate now to have unprecedented access to the royal collections thanks to the website of the Royal Collection Trust. The description of the painting on this website informs us that the engraving was executed by Joseph Alfred Annedouche. Queen Victoria wrote in her journal on May 17th, 1844:
“Albert has bought 3 beautiful pictures from Mrs. Nicholls’s collection (…) and I have bought a lovely child’s head by Greuze.”
Somehow the child in the engraving is more childlike and innocent than in the original painting. And there is another striking difference. The girl in the engraving looks straight at the spectator, while the girl in the painting seems to look past you, as if someone was standing behind the artist and caught the girl’s attention. The engraver did not transfer this characteristic feature of the painting into his copy. It is also noticeable that the title of the reproduction does not match the title of the original. Where the original is catalogued as “Head of a girl”, which is a rather bland descriptive title and places the work in the category of portrait- or genre-painting,. The title of the reproduction, “Childhood”, suggests a more allegorical and meaningful connotation.
The engraver of the elegant portrait of Lady Constance Leveson-Gower (1834–1880), later Duchess of Westminster, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805–1873), had a similar approach. The eyes are vivid and clear. And the reflection of the light in the eyes is more prominent than in the original portrait. This is partly due to the very nature of steel engravings, with their razor-sharp lines. He did a splendid job in rendering the details, like the flowers in the hair. It’s a delightful activity to follow the flowing lines of the engraving, to study the work up close up close, or even closer with the help of a magnifying glass. You can find more information about the original on the website of the Royal Collection Trust.
Queen Victoria wrote about this portrait:
“Constance’s Picture has enchanted us; it is exquisite, and I am delighted to possess this Portrait of your beautiful Child. (…)”.
Franz Xaver Winterhalter was a well-known portrait painter who made a good living by painting portraits of the haute bourgeoisie, the aristocracy and royalty. When you search for his name on the Royal Collection Trust’s website, you will discover that it contains many works by him. I must admit that I didn’t know of him before I started to research the origins of the engravings. This doesn’t say anything about him, but only shows the lack of interest of my professors in nineteenth-century painting during the period I was a student. The literature we were supposed to read in Leiden followed a different canon, which excluded painters such as Winterhalter.
We always see everything in retrospect, but this painting was still relatively new when the crew hired by Hall started copying the paintings. The selection of reproduced paintings included both old masters as well as contemporary art.
These engravings may not be the primary works of art, but they have great charm, and a full life of their own. I am thankful of my great-aunt for having taken the trouble to transport these books with hundreds of engravings to the Netherlands and bequeathing them to me.
Exit aunt Annie
Afterword — In a coming post, I will write about my writing process. I focus on meaningful long-form stories, weighing every word and ignoring advice from writing gurus and celebrity writers. Short, adjective-free sentences with a high ‘readability score’ are not what I aim for. Every writer writes for an audience, and I guess my audience is literate.