Portret van David Williams 1867 - 1875

This small portrait of David Williams was made by William Gee Parker, sometime in the late nineteenth century. During this period, photography was becoming more accessible to the middle classes, so people who didn't have the wealth to commission a painted portrait could now have their likeness captured. But studios still presented the experience as closely as possible to formal painted portraiture, with backdrops, props and poses chosen to convey a sitter's social status and respectability. The trappings of the chair and the striped dress are meant to convey a sense of middle-class respectability. But there is an element of social performance here too. How often would David Williams have actually sat like this? Understanding the history of photography and the culture of nineteenth-century portraiture gives us a richer sense of the image as a carefully constructed representation of social identity. This is the sort of thing that an art historian might research by looking at photographic collections and archives, newspapers, advertisements, and advice manuals from the period.