Mrs Fanny Sterling

A carte-de-visite portrait of the actress Fanny Stirling, usually known as Mrs Stirling, who had a long and successful career, becoming something of a grande dame of the theatre and a great favourite among her fellow thespians.

She is seen here as as the eighteenth-century Irish actress Peg Woffington in Masks and Faces, a play by Charles Reade and Tom Taylor that was first performed in 1852.

One of Queen Victoria’s carte-de-visite albums in the royal collection at Windsor contains a variant pose showing a seated Mrs Sterling holding the painting seen here on the left, with her face poking through the hole in the canvas.

Photographed in the spring of 1860 by Camille Silvy of London.