This project is a photographic and collage-based work that engages with historical painting through fragmentation and re-composition. By photographing selected details of two nineteenth-century portraits from the V&A in London and reassembling them into a composite image, the work treats the paintings as material to be examined, divided, and restructured. Drawing on David Hockney’s multi-perspective approach, the process emphasises how vision is constructed through partial views rather than a single, unified gaze.

The two source works are Frances Anne Vane, Marchioness of Londonderry, and Horace van Ruith’s Native Lady of Umritsar. They depict two women from very different social and cultural contexts, represented respectively by a French portraitist and a British-German painter. Placing them together explores how portraiture constructs differing forms of visibility, identity, and status within nineteenth-century visual culture.

Frances Anne Vane’s portrait commemorates her attendance at the coronation of William IV in 1831, showing her wearing jewels from a renowned collection acquired through inheritance, coal-mining wealth, and gifts from Tsar Alexander I. A prominent society hostess, she later managed the family’s industrial enterprises. Horace van Ruith’s painting, exhibited and acquired in London in 1886, depicts a woman from Amritsar through detailed attention to her dress and extensive jewellery, her pose arranged to display richly embroidered zardozi garments.

Through this reconstruction, the project examines how portraiture directs attention to material display, making visible both the contrasts in how the sitters are framed and the shared visual elements across the two works. By composing these fragments into a single profile, the work challenges fixed historical hierarchies and proposes a fluid understanding of femininity within imperial contexts, where identity is layered and perpetually re-edited—much like the collage itself.