Illustrated Photograph Album

This photograph album is thought to be Mary’s earliest-surviving creative work. Decorated with elaborate watercolour illustrations, family photographs are pasted alongside cartes-de-visites (small photographic portraits) of famous figures, including Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen Victoria and Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia).

After cartes-de-visites were introduced in Britain in 1857, the creation of photograph albums became a popular pastime. This album provides a visual record of Mary’s early years and her family. This interest in documenting her life and those close to her, would evolve in later years through her prolific diary writing and her biography and cataloguing of her husband George Frederic Watts’s life and work.