Russian couple

Studio portrait of a Russian man and woman, a married couple, standing together as if about to embrace.

Photographer: William Carrick studio (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Date of photograph: 1860s
Continent: Europe
Geographical area: Central and Eastern Europe
Country: Russia
Region/Place: St. Petersburg
Cultural group: European Russian
Format: Carte de visite
Size: 109 x 62 mm
Acquisition: Joan Evans. Donated August 1941

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Primary documentation: ‘[p.588] Dr. JOAN EVANS, from the property of the late SIR ARTHUR EVANS, Youlbury, Boars Hill, Oxford. [List of items follows]’; ‘[p.590] 29 Photographs of Russian types, in box’: Pitt Rivers Museum accession records (Donations X, 1937–1941), pp.588, 590. In negative: ‘209’ (written on original negative).

Research notes: This carte de visite, otherwise unattributed, has been identified by Philip Grover as a photograph by William Carrick, the attribution being made by comparison with 1941.8.152; note the same back wall and skirting board. Carrick’s studio is described as being located at ‘19 petite Morskoi’, or No. 19 Malaya Morskaya [literally, ‘19 Little Morskaya street’], in St. Petersburg. The male subject has been identified as a ‘floor-cleaner’, from a captioned photograph by Carrick of the same individual in a collection elsewhere. William Carrick (1827–1878) was a photographer, of Scottish descent, who opened a studio at 19 Malaya Morskaya (just off Nevsky Prospect), in St. Petersburg, in 1859. He achieved some success as a commercial portrait photographer but ultimately made his name as a photographer of Russian folk scenes, both urban and rural, and of painting: Jeremy Howard, ‘Carrick, William (1827–1878)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/40413 (accessed 29 January 2013). For more information on Carrick’s life and career, see Felicity Ashbee and Julie Lawson, William Carrrick, 1827–1878 (Edinburgh, 1987); Sergei Petrov, ‘William Carrick and Russian Culture’, translated and edited by Felicity Ashbee, Scottish Slavonic Review, 5 (1985), pp.72–87; Felicity Ashbee, ‘William Carrick: A Scots Photographer in St. Petersburg, 1827–1878’, History of Photography, 2/3 (1978), pp.207–222; and Felicity Ashbee, ‘The Carricks of St Petersburg’, in The Caledonian Phalanx: Scots in Russia (Edinburgh, 1987), pp.90–105.