Studio portrait of two fashionable young women. Echuca, northern Victoria, circa 1875.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 102 x 63 mm (mount); verso with decorative sepia back mark of ‘G.H. Kendall, Photographer, High Street, Echuca’; the print has a few tiny surface marks but is otherwise in fine condition; the mount is very clean.

A beautifully composed portrait study of two young women – possibly sisters – wearing matching dresses and with similarly elaborate coiffures. The focal point of the artistic arrangement is the elegant draped hand of the woman on the right. A most unusual composition for a tiny regional studio on the Murray River in the 1870s!

The sitters are unidentified, but the carte came from an album belonging to the Officer-Blackwood and Watson families of northern and central Victoria and the Deniliquin district in the New South Wales Riverina.