Portret van twee kinderen in matrozenpakken

Max Kretzschmer’s diminutive photograph depicts two children in sailor suits, and can be read as a document of European social history. The sailor suit became popular at the mid-nineteenth century, after Franz Joseph I dressed his son in one. As a fashion, it reflected the increasing importance of the navy in international affairs and the growth of a middle class able to emulate aristocratic trends. It also speaks to the rise of photography as a tool for recording family life, and the spread of visual culture through new technologies of reproduction. The formal composition and the subjects’ serious expressions reflect the conventions of portraiture at the time. In order to fully understand this image, we might investigate the history of fashion, the technologies of photography, and the social conventions of childhood in the late nineteenth century. The meaning of art always depends on its broader historical and institutional context.