An early nineteenth century posthumous portrait of two boys, gazing down from the Heavens over a wooded landscape. Expensively framed by Borini of Birmingham, who features in the 1820 Trades Directory of that town.
It is reasonable to suppose that these young brothers perished in a typhus or cholera epidemic, prevelant in the growing manufacturing towns of the Industrial Revolution. Our forebears would have found nothing morbid about these portraits of the dead, indeed they would have brought solace to the living. The practice was to grow apace with the dawn of photography in the following decades.
