Wheaton Blog

In this uncut sheet of carte-de-visite portraits, Princess Marie Czartoryska wears traditional Polish dress. Colleen Mangan ’13 reads that choice as reflecting her family’s political belief that Polish nobility and…

David LaFleche ’14 notes that, unlike other 19th-century scenic photographs of the city which tend to emphasize wide empty streets and imposing French architecture, this…

Sophie Kilcoyne ’13 discusses the theatricality of this stereoscopic image—the way it gives its viewer an impression of being a participant in the scene—which suggests…

Emmy Kennett ’16 identifies the strategic choices made by this anonymous photographer which allowed him to emphasize the impressive grandeur and stately order of the…

Josephine Johnson ’13 examines the unstable boundaries separating idealized nudity from pornography in the 19th century.

Nickolas Falla ’16 examines an image glorifying the expansion of France’s railway system. Because Collard’s photograph was taken from inside the train tunnel, it gives…

Andy Cavacco ’13 discusses Marguery’s emphasis on the dangerous nature of the work being done. He reads the photograph’s composition as capturing both the social…

By looking at a series of carte-de-visite which capture differences in French dress over a 30-year period, Ceara Bowman ’16 proposes how fashion conveys both…

Gabe Bornstein ’14 examines Vallou de Villeneuve’s portrait of the French actor Joseph Isidore Samson for its attempts to associate sitter with authorship and knowledge,…

Nadine Biss ’13 reads it as a powerful image of death—both of the celebrity herself and of the more carefree French belle époque past with…

Alexandra Barie ’13 discusses how the carte-de-visite format— allowing for photographic portraits to be easily exchanged and collected from mid-19th century on—was used by two…

Watson Conversations is a growing collection of podcasts produced by Wheaton students as part of Art History 298 and Art History 240