Your questions answered

Is it a painting or a photo?

QI would welcome any thoughts that Jayne Shrimpton may have on dating this hand-coloured portrait. The subject will be either my great-great-grandfather, James Thomas Peake (1821-1865) or his son, James Ashman Peake (1844-1924). Frustratingly, there is a date on the reverse – November 24 – but no year. Is it likely to have been a portrait, or could it possibly have been taken from a photograph? There are pencilled instructions on the back for a company in Bristol (unnamed) as to which colours should be used for hair, eyes, complexion, whiskers etc. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Nigel Peake

AThank you for sending in this interesting family heirloom. While original artworks are popularly referred to as portraits, technically-speaking all human likenesses are ‘portraits’ – whether photographs, paintings, drawings, even images in more unusual media. But these terms are easily confused: essentially you want to know whether this is an original, hand-crafted painting – or a picture that originated as a photograph.

Periodically this kind of portrait surfaces in family collections – an enlarged head and shoulders professional photograph that has been heavily retouched using paint. Most commercial photographic studios offered an enlarging service and clients sometimes ordered a bigger copy of their photograph at the time of the initial sitting, or at some stage afterwards – a more substantial portrait for displaying at home. During the enlarging process some of the finer pictorial detail was lost and it was usual to re-touch or enhance the photograph using artistic media – frequently watercolour paint. Adding colour was also thought to present a more attractive, lifelike image, although, as we see, the paint was often applied quite heavily, producing a flat, two-dimensional quality and blurring the photographic/artistic effect.

RE-TOUCHING PHOTOGRAPHS

Unless they retained a decent in-house re-toucher, usually photographic studios sent their photographs and enlargements out to independent local artists or to companies specialising in such work. In this case, you know that the geographical location was Bristol, and this suggests that the original photographer was also based there, or nearby. Typically the studio issued instructions exactly like those you describe, advising the artist/re-toucher on