Exhibition "In the Forests of Borneo"
The Scrapbook
Extra content:
Scrapbook of Margaret Brooke (unpublished) 1897, Natural History Museum of Florence, Botany Collections.
In 1897, Margaret Brooke gifted Odoardo Beccari a very personal album, created in sentimental style and containing around 230 heterogeneous images, in terms ofsubject, technique, and origin. The album, whose origins date back to 1867, documents the passage of the object through different owners and reflects the social and cultural mobility of photographic albums of the time.
The first pages feature portraits of family members, artists, and English intellectuals, including some photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, such as the portraits of Louisa Pattle Bayley, Julia Jackson, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Henry Taylor, Lord Warwick, and the work La Madonna Aspettante; Yet a Little While (1865), which testify to the artistic influence of the photographer and the album’s connection to Victorian taste.
The following section, dedicated to Sarawak and the domestic life of Margaret Brooke, shows a stylistic shift: photographs, drawings, watercolors, and various clippings are arranged fragmentarily, alternating family scenes and colonial views with travel memories, adventure episodes, and botanical sketches. The album thus becomes a repository of personal memories, expressing at the same time the tension between domesticity, colonial imagination, and scientific aspirations.
Scrapbook of Margaret Brooke (unpublished) 1897, Natural History Museum of Florence, Botany Collections.