Artwork
Untitled
Untitled is a photographic photography by Katharine Emma Maltwood. It is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The work is a black‑and‑white photograph mounted on a green backing card.
About this work
Overview
The work is a black‑and‑white photograph mounted on a green backing card. It depicts a stone bust of a head wearing a flat‑brimmed hat and a stiff collar, rendered with smooth facial planes and minimal carving for the eyes, mouth, and hair. The stone appears to have been hewn from a single block, leaving the surrounding surface rough and emphasizing the hat’s crisp outline.
Subject & Meaning
The bust presents a stylized portrait of an individual, likely intended as a study of form rather than a specific likeness. The simplified features and restrained detailing suggest an interest in the essential geometry of the head, focusing attention on the relationship between the hat’s defined edge and the smoothness of the face.
Technique & Style
Carved from stone in a monolithic fashion, the sculpture employs a contrast between the polished facial surface and the unfinished background. The hat’s brim and the short, orderly hair strokes are rendered with precise, shallow incisions, while the rest of the block retains a raw texture, a common approach in early twentieth‑century portrait busts that balances realism with abstraction.
History & Provenance
The photograph entered the museum’s collection through the 1938 bequest of William Kineton Parkes, a novelist, art historian, and librarian noted for his scholarship on sculpture. Parkes had circulated questionnaires to sculptors in the 1920s, collecting visual material and responses that now reside in the Archive of Art and Design; this image is among the many photographs submitted by those artists.
Context
The image reflects a period when British sculptors were documenting their work for scholarly study, responding to Parkes’s inquiry into contemporary practices. The inclusion of the bust in his archive illustrates the collaborative exchange between artists and historians during the interwar years, offering insight into the material choices and aesthetic concerns of the time.
Artist & collection
Artist
She spent evenings sketching the neighbors’ cats in her Somerset cottage, then spent mornings hauling her camera out to the moors to capture the same cats doing something less dignified.
