Andrei Karelin
1870 (ca)
[Two Young Women at Window]

Albumen silver print, from glass negative
8 1/2 × 6 1/8 ins (21.6 × 15.6 cm) (image) 16 7/16 × 12 5/8 ins (41.7 × 32 cm) (mount)
 
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Museum Purchase, 2005, Accession Number: 2005.100.1152
 
Curatorial description (Accessed: 9 January 2018)
Trained as an icon painter, Karelin operated a photographic studio and drawing school in the provincial town of Nizhny Novgorod. His repertoire included portraits, landscapes, and city views, but his most artistically ambitious photographs were genre scenes staged in domestic interiors, such as this view of two young women before an open window. Like his British contemporary Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), Karelin skillfully blended reality and artifice to create picturesque images of provincial bourgeois life.
 
LL/79760