| Abstract: | Abstract The prim little girl in the century-old cabinet photograph 1 Connie Giickrist. Original in the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Purchased from D'Offay Couper Galleries, London, in 1971 is wearing her very best dress, and the bow fitted around her waist must have made it difficult to maintain a balance in a high wind. But she most certainly could have coped with the problem because rope-skipping was her particular talent, and she practised it as ‘the skipping girl’ on the stage of the Adelphi Theatre2. Good looks and a few lengths of hemp made 11-year-old Constance MacDonald Gilchrist a London celebrity, and a personage who needed no introduction as late as 1898. She fascinated painters. Whistler was captivated enough to make two studies of her, retaining one of them, Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl, Connie Gilchrist, until his death3. (It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.) Lewis Carroll svho, strangely enough, shared Whistler's interest in the theatre, also had a more than casual interest in little girls, and a near-professional interest in photographing them. That this great man has been occasionally criticized for this penchant seems hardly fair, but his diaries often betray a man caught in the grip of two passions—for children, and for photography. The passages on Connie Gilchrist are as good as any for illustration. |
