The Marvelous Album of Madame B

Sixty years before the avant-garde movements of the 1920s, Victorian women were experimenting with photo collage in their own personal albums and scrapbooks. Their compositions of photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining photographs of human heads with painted animal bodies, placing real people in imaginary landscapes and merging faces with drawings of common household objects.Published to accompany the major exhibition, The Art of Victorian Photo collage, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and traveling to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, this exquisitely designed gift book was inspired by an album in the collection of the Art Institute made by an anonymous Victorian woman, 'Madame B'. Featured in the exhibition as a prime example of the medium, this album is clever, fanciful, and surreal - at once perfectly in keeping with a Victorian sensibility and at the same time, utterly modern. This charming book will make an ideal gift for anyone interested in Victoriana, scrapbooking, 19th-century photography and collage.