Reclining nude study of Evelyn Hatch  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

Reclining nude study of Evelyn Hatch[1] (1879) is a photo by English children writer Lewis Carroll.

It is one of the six surviving nude photographs of children. Most of Carroll’s nude photographs were destroyed, at his instruction, when he died.[2] Out of the thousand photographs that still exist today only six of them are surviving nudes. Four of the surviving nude portraits are of girls, Evelyn and Beatrice Hatch, and Annie and Frances Henderson. Two are of boys and are only rarely published.

Lewis Carroll's photographic studies of nude children were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced[3][4], five of which have been published and are available online. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden, because natural sunlight was required for good exposures.

The Wikimedia page notes that the picture of Evelyn Hatch was taken on 29 july 1879. The photo colouring was done by Anne Lydia Bond on Carroll's instructions. The pictures were first published in Morton N. Cohen's Lewis Carroll, photographer : four nude studies (1978). The book Pictures of Innocence: the History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (1998) has this uncoloured version[5].

The photo has been commented upon by Nina Auerbach:

"Evelyn Hatch needs no creatures to inform us that she is both animal and dreamer, pig and pure little girl ... The eroticism ... belongs to the child; the artist merely understands it." --Woman and the Demon p. 168

See also

• Evelyn Hatch as a gypsy sitting by a brook
• Karoline Leach