Paintings, Miniatures and Silhouettes

The tradition of painted portraits dates back to the early 16th century in Britain when the monarch and members of the court first commissioned artists to create flattering images intended to express their wealth and social status, to be preserved for posterity. During the early 18th century, portraiture began to extend beyond the aristocracy to the landed gentry and the emerging professional, industrial and commercial classes. Most surviving family paintings, then, will date from the 18th and 19th centuries when ancestors as diverse as clergymen, lawyers, sea captains, farmer/landowners, bankers, merchants and soldiers, and their families, sat for their portraits. Miniatures - usually watercolour paintings on ivory - were a more modest option than large oil canvasses, and were in great demand throughout the later 18th and early 19th centuries. Silhouettes - rapidly- executed profile likenesses on black paper - were a popular novelty during the late Georgian and Regency period.

Professional Studio Photographs

Photography was a revolutionary 19th century invention which opened up the portrait experience to a much wider public, although the first daguerrotypes of the late 1830s and 1840s could cost as much as a small painting and therefore remained luxury items. From 1851, ambrotypes - images on glass - offered a cheaper photographic product and by the early 1860s mass-produced photographs finally became a reality as paper photographic prints mounted onto card (known as cartes de visite) were purchased, exchanged and collected on a vast scale. For the first time, ordinary working people could afford a professional portrait: techniques and formats changed over the years but from the 1860s until after WW1, generations of ancestors from all walks of life visited the professional photographer's studio whenever they wanted to commemorate a special occasion - or simply because they could!

Amateur 'Snapshots'

The introduction of the Box Brownie camera in 1900 encouraged the development of amateur photography, so some early 20th century family portraits will be informal, amateur photographs. Only in the 1920s, though, did 'snapshots' taken mainly outdoors begin to eclipse formal studio photographs and interwar family photographs will include both.

With paintings spanning 300 years or more and photographs some 170 years, surviving portraits are in plentiful supply. For the 21st century family history researcher they offer a fascinating visual record of ancestors' faces and fashions, linking the generations across time and bringing the past closer to the present.