The Marvelous Album of Madame B

Sixty years before the avant-garde movements of the 1920s, Victorian women were experimenting with photocollage in their own personal albums and scrapbooks. Their compositions of photographs and watercolours are whimsical and fantastical, combining photographs of human heads with painted animal bodies, placing real people in imaginary landscapes and merging faces with drawings of common household objects. Published in association with the Art Institute of Chicago, this exquisitely designed gift book was inspired by an album in the collection of the Art Institute made by an anonymous Victorian woman, ‘Madame B’. A prime example of its genre, this album is clever, fanciful and surreal – at once perfectly in keeping with a Victorian sensibility and, at the same time, utterly modern.