Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage is a fantastic exhibit now on view through May 9th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The charmingly surreal fantasies on display are not the work of any famous artist, but were in fact created by Victorian English aristocrats long before collage was considered a serious art form.
Originally created to adorn the pages of personal albums and scrapbooks; these unique works of art combine drawing, watercolor painting, and photography to create amusing and often surreal pictures. Heads of friends and family were carefully clipped from photographs and applied to animal bodies, floating soap bubbles, playing cards, or even stuffed into pickle jars.
Viewing these works of wit and whimsy it’s easy to imagine Lewis Carol finding inspiration in these images created in the same years as his much beloved works Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
