Marion Everett, from World's Beauties, Series 2 (N27) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes 1888

Curator: Immediately striking is this card's size, its smallness emphasizing the almost unsettling perfection of Marion Everett's portrait. Made in 1888, this portrait, alongside others from the World's Beauties series, served as trade cards inserted into Allen & Ginter cigarette packs. It is currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Editor: There is something very precious about this image of Marion Everett, a kind of soft idealization in those colors, very appealing. Yet its existence as a mass-produced item, meant to be collected through cigarette consumption, taints it with something quite dark, actually. Curator: That tension is powerful, I think, speaking to the contradictions inherent in celebrity culture and consumerism even in the late 19th century. Marion, her name elegantly printed below the portrait, wasn't simply a face; she represented a type, an aspirational figure amplified through circulation. She’s placed just below a sign for cigarettes, like they should naturally come together. Editor: Indeed, we need to really look into those methods of reproduction: it’s made through color drawings and colored pencils, before being rendered into a commercial print. These "beauties" became instantly disposable yet carefully collected objects, revealing much about Victorian-era material culture and our complicated relationship with luxury goods. Curator: And consider the colors chosen, the specific use of color. Her features are idealized, yes, but the artist takes care to capture her unique attributes. A specific shade of blue for the eyes, red and pink for the cheeks, drawing a rosy idealized essence of Victorian feminine beauty, one the cigarette company wants to co-opt to the vice. The feather on the hat gives a boost to the image’s status. Editor: Quite! The act of production itself becomes a commodity. One wonders about the labour involved, the scale of the operation, all obscured behind the soft focus of Everett’s appealing eyes. These cards weren't created in isolation; a whole economy of printers, artists, and distributors facilitated this mass dissemination of imagery. Curator: Seeing beyond the immediate aesthetic appreciation, considering the object’s origins, that is its core fascination. An icon embedded within a consumable. Editor: Exactly! And examining the object within its complete context, not merely as a detached work of beauty, allows a fuller grasp of both the era and its less visible socio-economic underpinnings.