Julia and Ethel Arnold (1872): Art, History and Details

Julia and Ethel Arnold (1872) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Lewis Carroll (British, 1832–1898).

The work and its context

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

Best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, mathematician, lecturer, and church deacon Charles Dodgson was an avid amateur photographer. His subjects were wide ranging but he has become best known for his portraits of children, which avoid the formal, formulaic quality of studio portraiture of the time. Julia was 10 and Ethel was 6 when this photo was taken in Dodgson’s rooftop studio at Christ Church College, Oxford, on June 15, 1872. Ethel reminisced 57 years later that the times spent with Dodgson were “oases of brightness in a somewhat gray and melancholy childhood.” She also remembered that “for a nervous child . . . to keep still for forty-five seconds at a time was no mean ordeal.”

Object facts

• Title: Julia and Ethel Arnold
• Date: 1872
• Creator attribution: Lewis Carroll (British, 1832–1898)
• Culture: England, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print from wet collodion negative
• Dimensions: Image: 14.9 x 12.5 cm (5 7/8 x 4 15/16 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 1996.11

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, “The Cleveland Museum of Art Acquires Major Works,” March 18, 1996, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Tannenbaum, Barbara. "Cheating Death: A look at the first 50 years of portrait photography.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 56, no. 5 (September/October 2016): 8-9.

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.