This photograph shows the photographer’s daughter, Clementina (born 1847), posed in fancy dress in the light-filled interior of the family home at Princes Gardens, London. The image is typical of the highly sensuous and evocative interior scenes that Lady Hawarden produced. She often used props such as mirrors, drapes and rugs and dressed her children in theatrical costume. In this photograph, as in many others, the sitter is posed to imply a narrative that is not fully revealed. Hawarden was working at a time when photography was becoming commercialised, but amateurs such as she were free to explore unusual possibilities of light and subject matter.

Collodion-on-glass negatives were introduced in 1851. Collodion is a light-sensitive solution of ether and guncotton (cotton steeped in nitric and sulphuric acids). It was poured onto glass pates and had to be exposed in the camera while still wet. This process yielded a high level of detail in the image.

Virtually the whole of Lady Hawarden’s extensive corpus survives thanks to the donation by her granddaughter, Clementina, Lady Tottenham, of 776 prints to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1939. Judging from the torn corners of many of the prints (some of them subsequently trimmed with scissors), the prints originally belonged in albums: why they were removed remains unknown.