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Sideshow alley, infamy, the macabre & the portrait, Joanna Gilmour

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 176-187)

contains biographical information

federal national government publication

illustrationsportraits

no index present

non fiction

Sideshow alley

bibliography

Joanna Gilmour

infamy, the macabre & the portrait

Featuring a sometimes disquieting selection of portraits, Sideshow Alley combines history, biography and the art of portraiture with true crime, scandal and sensation. National Portrait Gallery Curator Joanna Gilmour introduces the relationship between death and portraiture via a focus on the various ways in which artists, photographers and entrepreneurs made use of portraits of Australian convicts and criminals: the canny or unscrupulous publishers trading in salacious prints and penny dreadfuls; the otherwise respectable people who put cartes de visite of serial killers into their family albums; the photographic studios doing a brisk trade in portraits of heroes and villains; and the waxworks proprietors who, with their 'Chambers of Horrors', turned violence, misfortune and the macabre into a lucrative art form. Combined with beautifully illustrated prints, drawings and photographs, Sideshow Alley discusses death masks and wax anatomical models amidst a surprising variety of objects, and draws an intriguing portrait of Australian society and culture during the nineteenth century

adult