Ceylonese Woman (c. 1880s): Art, History and Details

Ceylonese Woman (c. 1880s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Scowen & Co. (British, active Ceylon, 1876–1895); Skeen & Co. (British, active 1860–1920).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

European photographers took portraits of the people of the colonized nations not for their subjects, but to sell them to governments as information, to tourists as aides memoires, and to “armchair tourists” as aids to the imagination.

Object facts

• Title: Ceylonese Woman
• Date: c. 1880s
• Creator attribution: Scowen & Co. (British, active Ceylon, 1876–1895); Skeen & Co. (British, active 1860–1920)
• Culture: India, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print
• Dimensions: Image: 14.4 x 9.5 cm (5 11/16 x 3 3/4 in.); Paper: 14.4 x 9.5 cm (5 11/16 x 3 3/4 in.)
• Collection: PH - British 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2018.220

A detail from the museum

Skeen & Co. and Scowen & Co., the two leading photographic establishments in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in the 1880s, rarely signed their work.

Collection credit

Purchase from the Karl B. Goldfield Trust

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.