Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden

Clementina Maude, Viscountess Hawarden (née Elphinstone Fleeming; 1 June 1822 – 19 January 1865), commonly known as Lady Clementina Hawarden, was a Scottish amateur portrait photographer of the Victorian era. She produced over 800 photographs mostly of her adolescent daughters.

Family Clementina was born in Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, on 1 June 1822, the third of five children of Admiral Charles Elphinstone Fleeming (1774–1840), and Catalina Paulina Alessandro (1800–1880).

In 1845, she married Cornwallis Maude, 4th Viscount Hawarden, who was an Irish Conservative politician, and they lived mainly in Ireland;

The Viscountess Hawarden first exhibited in the annual exhibition of the Photographic Society of London in January 1863 and was elected a member of the Society the following March. Her work was acclaimed for its artistic excellence, winning her the silver medal for composition at the exhibition.

She then died of pneumonia before formally collecting it. She was aged 42. Lewis Carroll, an admirer of her work, brought two children to be photographed at this booth, and purchased the resulting prints.

Her work is often likened or 'compared favourably' to fellow aristocratic photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, although their aesthetics differ widely, as Cameron put less of an emphasis on composition, backgrounds or props.

Her photographic years were brief but prolific. Hawarden produced over eight hundred photographs between 1857 and her sudden death in 1864. Lady Hawarden's photographic focus remained on her children. There is only one photograph believed to feature the Viscountess herself, yet it could also be a portrait of her sister Anne Bontine.

A collection of 775 portraits were donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 1939 by Hawarden's granddaughter Clementina Tottenham. The photographs were torn or cut from family albums. This accounts for the torn and trimmed corners which are now considered a hallmark of Hawarden's work. It also indicates that the images were produced for family pleasure, not for commercial gain, which would have been considered inappropriate for 'an elite lady'.

Carol Mavor writes extensively about the place of Hawarden's work in the history of Victorian photography. She states "Hawarden's pictures raise significant issues of gender, motherhood, and sexuality as they relate to photography's inherent attachments to loss, duplication and replication, illusion, fetish."

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