Twin Babies
1870
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1870
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Twin Babies is a 1870 by Davis Brothers, a Impressionism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This painting shows two little girls in matching dresses. Their faces are bright pink from hand-applied paint. Unlike most colored photos of the 1800s, someone painted their whole image to look like a painting. This trick cost extra and took hours. Women often did this delicate work. It reminds me of early photo portraits. Look up The Cleveland Museum of Art.
Color photography was not widely available until the 20th century, but 19th-century photographs could be embellished with hand-applied paints or dyes for an extra charge. Hand coloring, often done by women, usually was limited to adding dabs of pink on lips and cheeks or gold on jewelry, but sometimes, as here, the entire surface would be covered to emulate a painting. The edges of this mount are covered with trial dabs of watercolor that would have been hidden by the mat. Once portraits leave the context of the family, the identities of the sitters are most often lost, as is the case for…
Read the full account in the museum source.
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