Getty Images: The Forgotten Glass Plate Photograph That Revealed the Remarkable Story of Connie Gilchrist

If you have ever tried to source photographs online, then you will have come across Getty Images.  As one of the world’s leading suppliers of licensed stock photography (not to mention editorial images, video footage and other forms of visual content), you might have wondered at the processes involved by Getty itself, to source the photographs and eventually bring them online.

In this video, Melanie Llewellyn of the Getty Images Hutton Archive in the UK, investigates a “forgotten” collection of glass archives.  Perhaps it's better to say that they had been archived for 150 years, awaiting the moment an expert would get to them! Using modern technology, she can quickly see the (startlingly high quality) image on the glass.  Yet identifying the person in the image sometimes takes some good old-fashioned human detective work.  The picture in the video turns out to be of Connie Gilchrist.  She came from humble beginnings and escaped the London slums by becoming an artist’s model.  She worked for a number of painters, including Whistler, and became a Gaiety Girl, performing a novelty act in the theater.  It was marrying into the aristocracy that was her real coup – the 7^th Earl of Orkney did a real Mr Darcy and shrugged off any misgivings he may have had about marrying a girl from the slums (not to mention the theater!).

That’s just a snippet of her life.  Watch the video below to learn more about the life of Connie Gilchrist, her later life – acceptance by Victorian society – and her daughter…  It makes for fascinating watching, all because of a single glass plate photograph.