"Poor Joe," by Oscar Gustave Rejlander

Poor Joe (alternative titles: Homeless and Night in Town)

Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813-1875)

Negative c.1860; print later

Carbon print; object No. 84.XA.828.6.13

20 × 15.1 cm (7 7/8 × 5 15/16 in.) but here cropped from page surround

Source: the J. Paul Getty Museum (Open Content program)

Described on the museum's site as follows: "A mirrored reproduction of Rejlander's portrait of a young boy in rags. The boy is curled up on a set of steps, his head buried in his arms which are crossed over his knees. His trousers are tattered and his shirt is falling off his shoulder." [Commentary continues below.]

Image and caption download, and discussion below, by Jacqueline Banerjee. [Click on the image to enlarge it, and mouse over the text for links.]

Rejlander was a genial, good-natured soul who used his camera in rather a modern way, to capture all classes of people and not just those who wished to have their portraits taken. Among his subjects, then, were the kinds of young street arabs who thronged London's thoroughfares. He evidently enjoyed their cockney brio but felt moved by their plight, recording scenes that evoked both kinds of responses, in the manner of Hogarth, and such genre painters of his own era as Thomas Benjamin Kennington. He was, as Stephanie Spencer has suggested, able to "blend the traditions of fine and popular art" (24). Works like this one appealed to the charities, just as Kennington's did, and according to Juliet Hacking the Shaftesbury Society used this particular one "for over a hundred years to highlight the plight of homeless children." One also wonders whetherit had any influence on Dickens when he created Joe, the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House. Spencer reports that critics generally responded more favourably to Rejlander's urchin photographs than to his more pretentious ones, that is, the ones that laid claim, like The Two Ways, to be taken as "high art" (see Spencer 24).

Bibliography

Hacking, Juliet. "Rejlander, Oscar Gustaf (1813–1875), photographer." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 20 July 2019.

"Poor Joe."The J.Paul Getty Museum. Web. 21 July 2019.

Spencer, Stephanie. "O. G. Rejlander's Photographs of Street Urchins." Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1984): 17-24.

Created 20 July 2019