Monday Morning Museum: Lewis Carroll

Posthumous Portrait of Lewis Carroll, after 14 January 1898 by Sir Hubert von Herkomer

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) – Friday 27 January 1832 Daresbury, Halton, Cheshire, England to Friday 14 January 1898 Guildford, Surrey, England
English Writer and Photographer

Alice Liddell As “The Beggar Maid”, circa 1859

“For Carroll, Alice was more than a favorite model; she was his "ideal child-friend," and a photograph of her, aged seven, adorned the last page of the manuscript he gave her of "Alice's Adventures Underground." The present image of Alice was most likely inspired by "The Beggar Maid," a poem written by Carroll's favorite living poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in 1842. If Carroll's images define childhood as a fragile state of innocent grace threatened by the experience of growing up and the demands of adults, they also reveal to the contemporary viewer the photographer's erotic imagination. In this provocative portrait of Alice at age seven or eight, posed as a beggar against a neglected garden wall, Carroll arranged the tattered dress to the limits of the permissible, showing as much as possible of her bare chest and limbs, and elicited from her a self-confident, even challenging stance. This outcast beggar will arouse in the passer-by as much lust as pity. Indeed, Alice looks at us with faint suspicion, as if aware that she is being used as an actor in an incomprehensible play.” – Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Next Monday’s Artist – Édouard-Denis Baldus
“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent