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Julia and Ethel Arnold
About the Artwork
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.”
Inscriptions
Scratched into negative: "48 [circled]"; "2045" [and another word or symbol - unclear]; written in pencil on verso: "Arnold"; in ink on verso: "2045"
Provenance
The Arnold Family
Exhibition history
Legacy of Light: Master Photographs from the Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 24, 1996-February 2, 1997). Cheating Death: Portrait Photography’s First Half Century. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (October 22, 2016-February 5, 2017).
Quick Overview
- Artist
- Lewis Carroll (British, 1832–1898)
- Date
- 1872
- Medium
- 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.)
- Type
- Photograph
- Classification
- Photograph
- Department
- Photography
- Credit line
- John L. Severance Fund
- Accession no.
- 1996.11
More by Lewis Carroll in museum collections
Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Open-access museum record · AT-00012964
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