A Dash of Colour

In the days before affordable and accurate colour film, photographic studios employed specialist staff to add a dash of colour to their black and white prints. As hand-colouring was costly and required considerable skill, it was typically reserved for photographs of special occasions. This stunning hand-coloured Swainson’s Studios debutante portrait of Joan Glanville-Clark (later Whittaker) is a brilliant example of the practice and has the added interest of having been hand-coloured by Joan herself. Joan worked as a hand-colourist for the Studio for a number of years and was tasked with tinting her own portrait. From her rosy cheeks to the blue of her bouquet, Joan has painstakingly coloured each individual detail by hand. The splash of red lipstick and dramatic shadowing capture something of the glamour and excitement of an official “debut”. When she generously donated this portrait to Puke Ariki, Joan explained that a standard-sized portrait such as this one would have taken her around 30 minutes to colour – and that was considered slow! Joan recalled that she was frequently getting in trouble for taking too long over a photograph. Personally I feel the time taken is well justified, we all know how tricky it can be to colour between the lines!