The Poor Man’s Picture Gallery

Exploring for the very first time the hidden relationship between paintings and stereoscopic cards in Victorian times. The advent of a new painting by a great artist was big news in the 1850s, but few were able to access and enjoy directly the new works of art. Stereo cards, created by enterprising photographers of the day, reconstructed the scenes and gave an opportunity for the man in the street to enjoy these scenes, in magical life-like 3D. The Poor Man’s Picture Gallery contains high-definition printed reproductions of well-known Victorian paintings in the Tate Gallery, and compares them with related stereo cards - photographs of scenes featuring real actors and models, staged to tell the same story as the corresponding paintings, all of which are the subject of an exhibition in the Tate Gallery in 2014.