Clementina Hawarden: The Victorian Photographer Who Turned a Room into a World
A young woman stands beside a tall swinging mirror. Her hand rests lightly on its frame; her profile turns away from us, while in the glass a second version of her looks back in a slightly different direction. Behind her, there is almost nothing — a bare wall, the hint of a window, a pool of afternoon light. The photograph was taken around 1863 in a house at 5 Princes Gardens, London, and its corners are torn as if someone once pulled it hastily from an album.
That someone was probably a family member. The photographer was the girl's mother, Clementina, Lady Hawarden, and for most of the twentieth century hardly anyone outside her family knew her name.
A Scottish girl, an Irish estate
Clementina Elphinstone Fleeming was born on 1 June 1822 in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, the daughter of Admiral Charles Elphinstone Fleeming and his Spanish-born wife, Catalina Paulina Alessandro. In 1845 she married Cornwallis Maude, who became the 4th Viscount Hawarden, and over the next years the couple had ten children — eight daughters and two sons.
Nothing in that biography suggests an artist. She kept no diary, and few of her letters survive. What we know of her inner life comes almost entirely from her pictures.
Those pictures began around 1857, when the family moved to their estate at Dundrum in County Tipperary, Ireland. There she started with stereoscopic photographs — paired images that leap into three dimensions when seen through a viewer — of the landscape, the house and its surroundings. It was a common hobby for wealthy amateurs. What came next was not common at all.
The studio that was a home
In 1859 the family returned to London and settled in South Kensington, a district then rapidly filling with grand terraces and new museums. Hawarden turned the first floor of 5 Princes Gardens into her studio. Instead of hiring a professional backdrop painter or building a glasshouse, she cleared the rooms of most of their furniture and the usual signs of upper-class comfort, leaving a few props: a mirror, a curtain, a chair, a starry wallpaper, a balcony opening onto the street.
She worked with the wet-collodion process, which meant coating a glass plate, exposing it while still wet and developing it immediately — fiddly, smelly work involving ether and other chemicals. From those negatives she made her own albumen prints, warm brown images with a soft sheen.
Above all, she worked with daylight. Rather than the flat, even light of the commercial studio, she let sun fall through the tall windows and across fabric, faces and floorboards. The V&A describes this use of natural light as daring for its time, and it gives her images their particular hush: you feel the time of day in them.
Daughters, doubles and dressing-up
Her models were her children, above all her teenage daughters Isabella Grace, Clementina and Florence Elizabeth. She posed them in pairs, leaning towards each other, whispering, one standing while the other sits, or stepping out onto the balcony where the London street dissolves into a blur behind them.
Mirrors became a recurring device. A girl and her reflection, or two sisters who almost mirror each other, created what curators often call "the double" — a doubling that is at once playful and slightly uncanny. Hawarden seemed less interested in a sitter's face than in the whole arrangement: the fall of a skirt, the angle of an arm, the relationship between figure and room.
From about 1862 the pictures turned theatrical. The girls appear in costume tableaux, mixing contents of a dressing-up box with fashionable dress of the day, so that it is never quite clear whether we are looking at a fancy-dress afternoon or a scene from a ballad. Viewers have compared the results to Pre-Raphaelite painting and to illustrations of Tennyson. Yet the photographs keep their own intimacy. These are not actresses but sisters at home, bored, amused, patient, absorbed.
Medals she never collected
As a viscountess, Hawarden could not sell her work without stepping beyond what was considered proper for a woman of her rank. But she could exhibit it. In 1863 she showed photographs at the annual exhibition of the Photographic Society of London and was elected a member of the society. She exhibited again in 1864. In both years she was awarded the society's silver medal, recognised among other things for composition.
She was known in her own circle. The Museum of Modern Art, which showed her work in 1990, lists among her admirers the printmaker Francis Seymour Haden, the museum founder Henry Cole and the photographer Oscar Rejlander. Another admirer was Charles Dodgson — better known as Lewis Carroll — himself an accomplished amateur photographer. Carroll bought five of her photographs and put them into an album he titled Professional and Other Photographers. According to accounts of the episode, he acquired prints at a charity bazaar in aid of the Female School of Art, where Hawarden made portraits at her stall — the only known occasion on which she photographed in public.
Then, abruptly, it ended. Hawarden died of pneumonia on 19 January 1865, aged just 42. Some writers have wondered whether years of handling photographic chemicals weakened her health; it is a plausible thought, but impossible to prove. Neither silver medal was ever collected.
Rescued by a granddaughter
In seven or eight years Hawarden produced around 800 photographs. After her death they stayed with the family, pasted into albums, and her reputation faded with the generation that had known her.
The turn came in 1939, when the Victoria and Albert Museum staged an exhibition marking a hundred years of photography.
Her granddaughter, Lady Clementina Tottenham, visited and was disappointed to find no trace of her grandmother. Her response was generous: she gave the museum 775 photographs — around ninety per cent of Hawarden's known output. The V&A, fittingly, stands only a short walk from Princes Gardens, where the house is now part of Imperial College London.
The prints arrived carrying the scars of their domestic life. Many had been torn from album pages, leaving ragged corners. Today those tears are part of their character: even where two prints come from the same negative, the damage makes each one unique.
Why she still matters
Recognition came slowly. Her photographs appeared in the V&A's touring survey of Victorian photography in 1984; curator Virginia Dodier organised an exhibition of her work that travelled to MoMA in New York in 1990; and in 1999 the V&A devoted a full show to her, Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life, 1857–1864.
Next to her famous contemporary Julia Margaret Cameron, with her soft-focus heads of poets and sages, Hawarden can look quiet. But look longer. Her photographs are about space as much as people — about the room as a stage, light as a material and the strange closeness of mothers, daughters and sisters. They anticipate, a century early, the staged and self-aware photography of later artists who turned domestic interiors into psychological theatre.
The writer Carol Mavor has argued that the pictures "raise significant issues of gender, motherhood, and sexuality." Perhaps that is why they still feel alive. They are records of a family, but they are also a mother's long, patient act of looking — at girls on the edge of adulthood, half in the light and half reflected in the glass.
