A domestic interior

A carte-de-visite portrait of a young woman sitting in a domestic interior. The portrait is relaxed and informal and in many ways it feels more like a 20th-century snapshot than a 19th-century portrait. The young woman is slouched at a table, as if exhausted from her needlework. There's a sewing machine clamped to the table and a workbasket beside her on the floor. She seems to be working on the semi-transparent black veil which is draped across her lap.

Sitting opposite here there's another young woman, but she's been almost entirely cropped out of the image; only her skirt can be seen. Part of her head can be seen in a companion portrait taken on the same occasion.

Photographed by William Barton Micklethwaite, who operated two studios, one at Biggleswade in Bedfordshire and another at Newry in Ireland (now in Northern Ireland), which must have entailed a fair amount of travel.

I struggle to imagine the circumstances under which these two portraits were taken. Would the photographer have travelled (with his cumbersome camera and glass plates) to the young women's home? This wasn't that unusual, but if he went to all that trouble, you'd expect something a little more posed. Or were these women perhaps his relations and living with him, which would go some way towards explaining the informality of the two portraits.