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James Robertson
Circassian Lady
1853-1856
Transitional or dilute albumen print, hand-coloured
National Gallery of Australia (NGA)
LL/76147
(Alex Novak): A stunning example of a beautiful veiled woman. With inked title below image. Unlike so many other painted Robertsons, this one has a bit more subtlety to the coloring and shows a great deal of the beautifully toned early albumen print underneath. So many such prints are termed "salt prints", but I suspect that many are colored albumen prints.
See: Ken Jacobson, Odalisques & Arabesques: Orientalist Photography: 1839-1925, p.192 for what appears to be the same woman in a standing pose.
Circassian beauties is a term used to refer to an idealized image of the women of the Circassian people of the Northern Caucasus. A fairly extensive literary history suggests that Circassian women were thought to be unusually beautiful, spirited and elegant, and as such were desirable as concubines. This reputation dates back to the Ottoman Empire when Circassian women living in the Sultan's Imperial Harem started to build their reputation as extremely beautiful and genteel, and then became a common trope in Western Orientalism.
Mark Twain reported in The Innocents Abroad (1869) that "Circassian and Georgian girls are still sold in Constantinople by their parents, but not publicly." The Circassians became major news during the Caucasian War, in which Russia conquered the North Caucasus, displacing large numbers of Circassians southwards. In 1856 The New York Times published a report entitled "Horrible Traffic in Circassian Women—Infanticide in Turkey", asserting that a consequence of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus was an excess of beautiful Circassian women on the Constantinople slave market, and that this was causing prices of slaves in general to plummet.
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