A studio family portrait of incredible composition and tonal range. A woman dressed in black with identically dressed daughters of different ages. This is a postmortem memorial photograph which is not that uncommon for the times – the clue is the photograph propped against the cushion in the foreground; in it is the family with the father holding the younger daughter several years before.
You can be certain these little girls understand the significance of this event, but we can only speculate about how recently their father died.
The mother’s sleeves in the earlier photograph places this in the 1890s.