This charming Victorian cabinet card features two adorable young girls posed together in matching-style dresses, each holding a doll, creating an especially appealing late-19th-century childhood portrait. The handwritten inscription on the reverse identifies them as Ellen Joyce C., age 4½, and Janet Evelyn Chevallier, age 3½, and dates the photograph to 1894. The portrait was produced by Wayland & Co. Studios, Rembrandt House, Blackheath, with another studio at Streatham, and the reverse proudly advertises “Children A Specialty,” making the subject of this photograph particularly fitting. The Blackheath studio is associated with photographer Henry Abraham Booth Wayland (1859–1922), whom the National Portrait Gallery identifies as a London photographer working at Rembrandt House, Blackheath. Examples of Wayland’s cabinet-card portraiture are held in the National Portrait Gallery collection. He is a photographer held in high esteem. SOLD
Leave a comment