Among the photographic albums of the William James Stillman Collection at Union College is Album 8,a small cloth bound album with a leather cover. An alumnus of 1848, Stillman is known for his international career as a journalist, photographer, and diplomat. From traveling from New York to London to Greece and to a variety of other corners of the globe, Stillman came to influence the political, social, and cultural scenes of the nineteenth century. Union College holds more than four-hundred prints of Stillman’s work as well as a collection of letters detailing correspondence between archaeologists, political figures, and family members, donated primarily in the 1950s and 70s by Stillman’s family. Album 8 is unique in this collection because the subject is Stillman’s second wife and Pre-Raphaelite painter, Marie Spartali.
The album consists of seventeen images of Spartali across its thirty pages; it is partially full and well-preserved. Strikingly, ten of the seventeen prints of Album 8 are works of Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the most groundbreaking portraitists of the Victorian era; Stillman’s photographic hand is absent for the majority of this artifact. The on-going research surrounding Album 8 aims to determine its objecthood in relation to Stillman’s life, the nineteenth century Pre-Raphaelite art world in England, as well as the symbolic cultural underpinnings of its contents. The sequence of the images of Spartali appear to trace the trajectory of her life from a young woman, to a Pre-Raphaelite painter, to a mother; the album looks and feels like a tribute to her. By bringing together William J. Stillman, Marie Spartali, and Julia Margaret Cameron, Album 8 allows for questions to emerge regarding its construction, Victorian costume, Stillman’s personal life, transnational identity, as well as Spartali’s ascension into the Pre-Raphaelite world.