(accidental parallax) Actress Lucille Western? circa 1865
Image by Thiophene_Guy
To see the animated image source scroll down to the first comment below or right click and view original size.
Details and History
The Library of Congress website offers a multitude of historical images, many with no known restrictions on use. This portrait of Miss Weston was constructed from two separate images, one named "Lucille Weston" and the other "Miss C. Weston". This seems an example of accidental parallax arising from redundant exposures with unintentional camera movement between. Slow photography of the time necessitated staging a pose and holding it for several seconds to avoid blurring. The photographer is likely Mathew B. Brady or his apprentice Levin C. Handy.
Web searching the name in the context of acting most frequently returns stories about Lucille Western, with her name misspelled "Weston". This seems a different person when compared with images at the NY pubilc lbrary but bears some similarities to a different image titled Probably Lucille Western. Makeup and lighting make comparisons more challenging. Enlarged images similarly show large, free (not attached) earlobes.
The actress Lucille Western
She became famous performing in "coarse and lurid" plays, as her NY times obituary recalled. The same source indicates her signature role in "East Lynne", using an adaptation she purchased cheaply, earned her up to 0,000 in the 16 years before her death. An approximate valuation of 1877 currency in 2010 dollars is 20 times larger.
Her brutal oeuvre was popular with audiences, if not critics. Louis James, 25 years after her death, recalled her as being both crude and uneducated, but with [a] gripping temperament. A fascinating recollection of a gasman (gaslight operator) and electrician recalled her signature role, "She made the play. She threw her whole soul into Nancy, and the result was a ghastly success. The manager complained of fainting patrons but she refused to make the performance less shocking. "Did you ever see a woman with her brains knocked out? That’s what Nancy was at the last. That’s what I’m playing," she argued. On training a male lead she critiqued the initial run through: "That will never do," said she. "Don’t be afraid of me. I won’t crumble to pieces. Take hold of my hair. You’ve got to drag me around by it. It’s in tight and won’t come out. You’ve got to kill me, and I’m going, to struggle for my life, understand?" She was the greatest natural actress I ever saw. Her education amounted to very little. (Excerpted from "Gasman and Electrician Tell Some Stories of Noted Satellites and Favorites of Stagedom", The Sunday Oregonian, Portland 7/27/1913),
An article "STAGE ACCIDENTS" from the 2/18/1893 Buffalo Evening News recalls an incident where she fired a powder rifle into an actor’s face, and didn’t realize he was seriously hurt. When she found out, she fainted.
Quick Links to related Animated Stereo Images
Images by Mathew Brady.
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Copyright Advisory
The purpose here is not to duplicate the original image, from the Library of Congress website, but to generate a downloadable animated gif to assist viewing and presentation. The original images have no known restrictions on use:
www.loc.gov/pictures/item/brh2003004678/PP/
www.loc.gov/pictures/item/brh2003004679/PP/
Technical trivia
Lightroom was used to bring out the details in the white dress and shirt. Additional image manipulations and gif generation done with StereoPhotoMaker, a freeware program by Masuji Suto & David Sykes.
