Marble bust of Agrippine the younger

The bust portrays Agrippina, the daughter of the Roman emperor Germanicus and mother of Nero, a figure often represented in classical sculpture to convey imperial lineage and power. By reproducing this object, the photograph extends access to a work that would otherwise be confined to a single museum space.

Laffon employed the wet‑collodion process, the dominant photographic method of the 1860s, which required a glass plate to be sensitized, exposed, and developed while still wet. The resulting image captures fine tonal gradations of the marble surface, emphasizing the sculptural relief and the play of light across its contours.

In 1864 the V&A acquired a batch of five hundred photographs from Laffon’s series on the Campana Collection, purchased through the dealer Monsieur E. Cappe. These works entered the museum’s National Art Library holdings, intended for use by scholars, students, and museum staff as visual references.

Louise Laffon was among the few women active in the Société Française de la Photographie, reflecting the broader, often under‑recorded contribution of female photographers to the V&A’s educational mission. The museum’s own photographic service, led by figures such as Isabel Agnes Cowper, complemented the external commissions that Laffon supplied.

The photograph exemplifies the V&A’s pioneering role in collecting and exhibiting photography, illustrating how early photographic reproductions served as pedagogical tools and expanded the visual repertoire available to artists and researchers in the Victorian era.