| I have encountered three such photo-textiles in the last few years - all portraits of young girls, taken in the early 1900s; one could be dated to 1905 through associated family documents. All were printed on a satin-weave fabric, using an emulsion (or gelatine?) coating used for image transfer, like a collatype. The granddaughter of one of the subjects seemed to think the portrait----- may have been taken by an itinerant photographer. If you have access to any turn-of-the-century printing year books(Penrose's Pictoral Annual, for example), describing printing innovations and practices of the time, you may be able to get more information about how the prints of that era were made. Your example is interesting because it appears to be a drawing with a photographed portrait head applied. I've seen similar American Civil War portraits on paper, where the photo-image head was placed within an etching of a uniformed soldier standing in a formal setting. This doesn't say much about dating the costume but maybe dating the process would help nail it down. Jane Hammond On Dec 1, 2008, at 8:29 PM, Kim Baird wrote:
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