C19th dress

[Francoise Rosset]

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 16:11:23 +0100
  Andrew Otty <amo203 at EXETER.AC.UK> wrote:
> Can anyone suggest a good resource (book / web etc) for finding 
>images of late-C19th provincial-Russian dress (mainly merchant class, 
>but also cossacks and low-ranking civil servants)? Also, what did 
>people wear to swim?!

Look at the pictures by Prokudin-Gorsky. While most of them are
land- and cityscapes, there are people in several of them. There was
a book published, _Photographs for the Tsar_ and there is a web 
archive
now (the first link). It's not as searchable as I'd like it to be, but 
it works
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/readmore.html
http://www.prokudin-gorsky.ru/collection.htm

Many more people in  Chloe Obolensky's _The Russian Empire: A Portrait
in Photographs_. There's a bathing party in one of those pictures, in 
a
section illustrating country life. They're wearing your typical 
European
bathing outfits of the time (but then they were having their picture
taken ... so who knows what they wore in more private settings).

If you're looking for photographs of primarily Jewish communities,
try _Beyond the Pale_.
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/beyond-the-pale/
It's a bilingual web archive with several of pictures of shtetl life, 
esp.
the section "Life in the Pale of Settlement." I would guess many of 
the
outfits of working-class types, auch as cobblers and smiths, are not
specifically Jewish so much as local and provincial.

Finally, look at Natalia Nesterova's _The Itinerants, The Masters of
Russian Realism_. Lots of excellent reproductions of genre paintings,
you'll just need to narrow the dates down to what you need.
-FR

Francoise Rosset
Chair, Russian and Russian Studies
Coordinator, German and Russian
Wheaton College
Norton, Massachusetts 02766
Office: (508) 285-3696
FAX:   (508) 286-3640

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