Portrait of a Young Woman

This is an opalotype (also spelled opaltype), a rare and short-lived Victorian photographic process patented in 1857 by Glover and Bold of Liverpool. Unlike a conventional photograph on paper, the image is fixed directly onto a sheet of opaque white "milk glass" — either by transferring a carbon print onto the glass surface, or by exposing a light-sensitive emulsion on the glass directly through a photographic negative. The technique produced a distinctively soft, luminous image, often compared by contemporaries to watercolour, pastel, or fine ivory portrait miniatures. Opalotypes were never widely produced and largely disappeared by the 1930s, with most surviving examples dating from the 1890s to early 1900s — consistent with the styling of this portrait.