Oei hui lan biography of albert

Concluding his overview of the recently digitised Pirkis Collection, Dr Andrew Hillier digs further into these cartes de visite to consider what the collection tells us about the legation world and the European presence in Peking more generally during the s and early s.

As we have seen, children in the Legation spent much of their time away from their parents. It seems from one of Bessie Pirkis’s paintings, that, by Christmas , Amy and Georgie, now aged six and three, each had their own amah and this certainly will have given Bessie more time for her music and art. For Christmas , she made sketches of a large number of the principal European figures in Peking. In addition to a self-portrait, the series comprised eight women and thirty-two men. Presumably, it was done by way of a Christmas gift for each of the sitters and, although identifying them has proved difficult, it most probably included all the officials in the British legation. At some point, perhaps before they were distributed, the individual images were assembled for the purpose of the photograph in Figure 1.