This strikes me as an impossible task for two reasons:
- the subject is in costume with a theatrical background (meaning that fashions in dress and portrait backgrounds will probably not be useful aids); and
- I'm looking for dating within a pretty narrow range.
But you may all enjoy the pic as much as me and my mum do!
I am almost positive that the picture is of the sister of my ancestor. I had found her in the 1871 census listed as an actress at the age of about 16, and had the wildly good luck of googling her and finding this photograph. This is a scan of the original that is in the possession of the institutional source, and is all I have access to.
She was in the theatre company in London 1870-71, that I have been able to identify from other sources. She married in 1875 and had children in 1879, 1880 and 1881. After that she disappeared and her husband emerged with a newer younger "wife" and a new name (likely related to a bankruptcy, likely associated with the fact that of the eight household servants at their 50-acre pile in the 1881 census, four were grooms). I tend to assume she died of phthisis (tuberculosis) in the early-mid 1880s, as her brother and her other brother's wife had, a decade earlier, and her daughter and niece did, a decade later. (They were from a mining area in Cornwall, and at least three other children had died in early childhood.) Pregnancy alleviates the symptoms of tuberculosis; the sister-in-law died shortly after the birth of the child who later died and I suspect the same thing for her. In any event, it seems unlikely she would have returned to the stage after being a wealthy matron, although given the husband's squandering of his fortune ...
The source dates this photo to 1885 +/- 5 years -- a decade or more after she was known to be on stage, and after her marriage. The subject just doesn't really look to me like a 25-35 year old woman.
Elliott & Fry first set up at 55 Baker Street in 1863 and remained there until 1919.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_%26_Fry"During World War II the studio was bombed and most of the early negatives were lost, the National Portrait Gallery holding all the surviving negatives."
Does anyone have a crystal ball or other means of educatedly guessing whether this photo was most likely taken
- c1870-1875
or
- c1880-1890
?
The boots look like the only possibly contemporaneous element in the composition!
(I begged, and of course would have paid for, a copy of the reverse side from the source a few years ago. Obviously, anything written on it would be hugely useful in making a positive identification, and dating. I was quite brusquely informed by the source's director that it would take far too much work to get the object out of the archive and do this. An archivist subsequently promised to look into it when she wasn't so busy, but I never heard back. Yes, I really should try again ...)
Any ideas welcome - thanks!
