William Notman’s Portrait Photographs of the Wealthy English-speaking Girls of Montreal: Representations of Informal Female Education in Relation to John Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens” and Writings by and for Canadians from the 1850s to 1890s
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay considers nine portrait photographs of the wealthy English-speaking girls of Montreal, taken in the photographic studio of William Notman (1857-1891). These photographs, now located in the Notman Photographic Collection at the McCord Museum of Canadian History, are also accessible through the museum’s website. The analysis focuses on these images as a pictorial record of the informal education of girls according to the beliefs and convictions of the upper-middle-class. Central to this inquiry is John Ruskin (1819-1900), recognized for his vision of how girls should be educated. With Ruskin’s “Of Queens’ Gardens” (Sesame and Lilies, 1864) as a basis for discussion, this paper also explores the sentiments and opinions expressed in magazine articles, novels, books, and other texts about girls that were read in Canada between the 1850s and the 1890s. The objective in aligning particular visual representations with corresponding historical texts is to explore how the ideals of a girl’s upbringing are embedded in Notman’s portraits, and conversely how the images illuminate the texts.raphs of Montreal girls by William Notman (1857-1891) located at the McCord Museum (accessible through the museum’s website) as a record of the ways girls were inculcated with educational values. Central to this inquiry is John Ruskin (1819-1900), highly recognized for his vision of how girls should be educated. With Ruskin’s essay "Of Queens’ Gardens" (Sesame and Lilies, 1864) as a guide, I demonstrate how Canadian publications mirrored Ruskin’s precepts, which is not to suggest that these authors were merely mimicking Ruskin’s words. The reason his wise counsel was so well received in Canada was because most of what he said fit with the progressive ideas that were gaining acceptance during this era. By extrapolating from Ruskin and Canadian sources, my objective is to show how these texts reveal the messages embedded in Notman’s photographs of girls and conversely how the images illuminate the texts.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it