Viola Allen, from the Actors and Actresses series (N45, Type 1) for Virginia Brights Cigarettes 1885 - 1891

This is Viola Allen, as captured by Allen & Ginter for Virginia Brights Cigarettes. The delicate shawl draped around her head speaks to us of modesty, but also evokes classical antiquity. This motif, of the veiled figure, echoes across time, appearing in Roman portraiture, where veiled women were figures of piety, and the Renaissance, where it symbolized chastity. We see it in Botticelli's "Venus," and later in Ingres’s portraits, each time subtly shifting in its psychological weight, mirroring the cultural anxieties of their age. This garment, simple as it is, invites us to ponder the performance of identity, of how we cloak ourselves in symbols that both reveal and conceal. It calls to mind the eternal dance between the hidden and the revealed, the sacred and the profane.