With this arresting photograph DGR began his brief but important collaborative involvement
with early photography and photographers. The picture was taken in the summer of 1863, probably in June when Downey came to 16 Cheyne Walk to take various photographs that DGR wanted (see DGR's letters to Brown and George Boyce of 10 and 16 June 1863,
The photograph may have influenced Whistler's celebrated painting
Symphony in White No. 2.
Even more than Whistler's painting, this photograph dramatizes the importance of the mirror
in Victorian aesthetics. The mirror dramatizes the presence of multiple perspectives,
something that DGR pursued with special vigor in his early work, where his study of Italian
primitive art laid the groundwork for his lifelong anti-illusionist program. The mirror also
blurred the borderline between nature and art, another key move in the symbolist aesthetics of
the later nineteenth-century. The new photographic medium called special attention to the idea
of the mirror precisely because it was at the time commonly denigrated as a purely
reproductive procedure, and (in the minds of many) scarcely
“art
” at all.
As the photograph and the Whistler painting show, the nineteenth-century introduced an important variation of the well-established Renaissance convention of the “woman before a mirror”. In the latter, the woman stares directly into the mirror whereas in the nineteenth-century pictures the woman is reflected obliquely. The difference is highly significant, as one sees in the abstracted features that are a hallmark of these pictures. It is likely that the iconograph of the Lady of Shalott, who is obliged to assume an oblique relation to her mirror, may have had an influence of this nineteenth-century visual trope. Holman Hunt was doing studies as early as 1850 for his late oil
.
DGR's collaborative photographs—see his extraordinary series of
The picture was posed by DGR in his garden at Cheyne Walk in 1863. The photograph was taken by William Downey.