The Factory Presents... Revealing the Prints, Drawings, Paintings, Photographs and Digital Art Collections

Vivandieres: Part 1

Guest post by Daniel Milford Cottam:   Hand-coloured lithograph by an unknown artist. French, 1850-1870. E.2872-1938 Today’s find is a group of six hand-coloured lithographs dated to the French Second Empire (1852-1870) showing the costumes of cantinières in the French Army. Cantinières (also known as vivandières) were women who officially served alongside their husbands in the armed...
Read More

Stereographs

Guest post by Zoe Clayton A stereograph is composed of two pictures mounted next to each other, viewed with a set of lenses known as a stereoscope.  Taken around 7cm apart, roughly corresponding to the spacing of the eyes, the left picture represents what the left eye would see, and likewise for the right, so when observing the pictures through a stereoscopic viewer, the pair of photographs...
Read More
Stereoscopic image of the Great Exhibition

Introduction to the Factory

One of the real privileges of working at a place like the Victoria and Albert Museum is being able to see behind the scenes and come across fascinating things by chance. We’ve been seeing such wonders over the last five years on the Factory project, so I and the rest of the team am delighted to be able to start sharing them with you more directly as we find them. If your curiosity is...
Read More
Stereoscopic image of a woman looking in a mirror
Blog Image

We are a group of cataloguers, photographers, curators and volunteers, nicknamed 'the Factory'. We are working through the stored collections of the Prints, Designs, Photographs, Paintings and Digital Art sections of the Word and Image department at the V&A, making sure that images and existing data about the items we hold are available to the public via Search the Collections.

Monthly archive