From Somewhere in Time

Hi

Amazing contrasting pics of the same person!

In Carroll's pic there is a coyness about Alice, the head bobbed to one side and the hand on the hip is graceful.

The Cameron one is stilted and devoid of anything warm or subtle.

Amazing pics.

Thanks for sharing

Now that is interesting. Alice as a child seems sweet, innocent and artless, and Alice as an adult seems fierce and guarded. Perhaps Carroll was trying to show Alice's artlessness . anyway that is what comes out most to me here.

Actually, it's not the 'beggar girl', it's 'The Beggar Maid' - taken from Tennyson's poem -

http://www.netpoets.com/cla... 064035.htm

Burne-Jones also painted a very famous work called 'King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.' When Dodgson did his study he was referencing all this. Rather important to know, if, as you say, you're trying to set it all in the appropriate historic background. Possibly JMC's work is another study based on the same theme?

The adult photo is printed the wrong way round. It should be the left hand that's cupped.

Since she's in character as The Beggar Maid maybe it's a bit rash to deduce too much about the model's personality - a bit like drawing conclusions about Lizzie Siddal's fondness for lying in ponds from Millais' Ophelia?

In both photos, Alice looks willful. That tendency is there in the child, but more pronounced by far in the adult.

Both photos look more like paintings. It would be interesting to see the preparation leading to the capturing of such evocating photos. What we see is all we know, but that 'clicking' of the moment never happens in isolation. We do not see the circumstances before and after the click. All the urgings to stand this way and that, to look hither and thither.

And then the aftermath. Did she flop down on the grass and laugh, and say "thank heavens that's over". We will never know!

Pardon me, I mean 'evocative' photos!

I grew up with a photographer as a father (coincidentally also named Charles) and I know from endless posing how grueling a photo session can be. Where my dad was concerned, you'd think he WAS using old-fashioned wet-plate techniques due to the amount of time he took to set up a single shot. Always drove me nuts! Consequently, he got some pretty strange facial expressions from me because of it. So I can commiserate with Alice! In Cameron's photo she can either look imperious or bored--her younger self was obviously having much more fun, thanks to the photographer.

Elvie, King Cophetua wasn't painted until 1884. Dodgson photographed Alice the beggar in the 1850s. I don't think he had the gift of second sight or foretelling the future! :)

Mrs. Cameron's photo also predates King C. When Burne Jones finally got around to doing his painting I doubt he was referencing either of them. I think beggar maids were a rather popular sort of topic, then, in line with the usual sickly Victorian sentimentality about sweet little match girks, poor little orphans, etc. etc. etc.

I don't think Burne-Jones' pic was sentimental at all. I think he painted what he fancied, it is rather sexy if you like that style. Tells you nothing about Dodgson of course.

Burne Jones waas referencing the Tennyson poem, and so was Dodgson. The point is if we're trying specifically to set Dodgson in his 19th C setting, then this is the kind of thing to be aware of. He's not just arbitrarily sticking the kid in some rags and telling her to be a beggar girl, he's being an artist doing an interpretation of a popular poem. Just as Burne Jones was.

The child looks more confident

The later photo is titled 'Pomona', the Roman goddess of fruit and orchards (JMC loved her classical and allegorical subjects - she also did her own version of Cophetua and the Beggar Maid). Presumably this accounts for the leafy background, and possibly also the cupped hand - Pomona was often depicted holding an apple, and maybe it was too early in the season. She certainly isn't begging.

Given that the pose isn't actually identical but reversed, and the fact that JMC couldn't stand Dodgson's work and wouldn't have been at all likely to copy him voluntarily, and the fact that Alice As Beggar Maid was not then the massive cultural symbol it is now, my guess is the similarity is pure coincidence.

Raine, you make a very valid point. It could merely be a very grueling photo session that accounts for Alice's apparent defiance or boredom, or a mix of both. Having been subjected to this sort of tedium yourself, you would know. Fascinating that your photographic father's name was Charles too.

Interesting, Justin. I would love to hear what JMC said about Dodgson's work. As I read your post, too, I thought this might have been where she could have seen a photo of Alice Liddell as a beggar maiden since they had what Dodgson describes as a "mutual exhibition" of each of their pictures in 1864.

This whole Pomona thing is interesting too. You obviously know a great deal about JMC (which wil be a lot more than me) but I always got the impression that JMC went to considerable trouble to get everything right, and so surely if she'd wanted to put an apple in Alice's hand, she would have put done so? Or at least a ball painted to look like an apple.

In fact, I cannot detect anything apple-like about the background (not even apple leaves or apple blossoms).

So at present I am not entirely convinced and feel that the images although Pomona is reversed, are too similar merely to be coincidence, particularly in the absence of an actual apple in Pomona.

JMC described one of Dodgson's photos, in a marvellously weird simile, as "looking like a sea monster fed upon milk" (it's part of a much longer quote which I can't locate offhand). I can't make it look like anything but an elderly gentleman with a white beard, but there you go.

I can't help wondering if you're influenced a bit partly by having first seen Pomona the wrong way round (where was that, by the way? I've found dozens of online reproductions, all facing correctly), and partly because The Beggar Maid is such a huge cultural symbol now that we can't imagine anyone not seeing it that way - but then it was just one photo, by a guy JMC didn't think much of, which she may just possibly have seen, once, eight years earlier.

And if it had made such a massive impression on her that she felt she just had to pay tribute to it - surely she'd have got it the right way round, and not given it a fake Classical title?
Maybe it would be helpful to reload Pomona the right way round and see if the resemblance still seems marked. (And just for the sake of accuracy).

If you can find the quote, I'd love it, and anything else she said about Carroll - just to add to my notes.

I've added a copy of Pomona the other way around - for me it makes no difference to the point, since the striking thing about Pomona is the curious cupped hand, which I don't recall in any other photos (except Alice as
beggar maid.)

The more I think about it the more surprised I am that it is entitled Pomona, since the picture is nothing whatever to do with apples orchards or fruit trees! Looks as if it could be a jasmine in the background

She was the apple of his eye ;)

Actually the full quote is quite easy to find - it's on p. 54 of the Collected Letters of Lewis Carroll (ed. Cohen) - so I won't go to the trouble of typing it up as I'm sure you must have a copy!
I'm not sure why you're making so much of the absence of apples - Pomona was goddess of fruit and gardens in general, and while she was often depicted holding an apple the background could be anything woody. In any case JMC chose to call the picture Pomona so, surprising or not, that's who it's meant to be!
Let's not forget that there were no supermarkets then and at some times of year - late spring, for example, otherwise a great time for photographing - apples would be simply unobtainable.
Would you mind telling me where you found and uploaded the reversed print? This sort of sloppiness is a bit of a pet peeve of mine and I'd like to contact those responsible to try and get it corrected.

Can't remember where I got it but one of the most interesting things to me is that there isn't any fruit, of whatever type, in her cupped hand.