Hannah Maynard’s Gems

Cassandra Spires
19 hours ago
3 min read

THIS PHOTOMONTAGE is an early entry in Hannah Maynard’s Gems of British Columbia series, which showcases the remarkable creativity and innovation the photographer is known for today.

Hannah Maynard; “Eighteen Hundred Gems of British Columbia Greet You!” from Gems of British Columbia; 1884; BC Archives, Royal BC Museum, Victoria. — Hannah Maynard; “Eighteen Hundred Gems of British Columbia Greet You!” from *Gems of British Columbia*; 1884; BC Archives, Royal BC Museum, Victoria.

Hannah Hatherly Maynard (1834 – 1918) was one of the first professional female photographers in Canada, owning and operating a portrait studio in Victoria, British Columbia, for 50 years.

Hannah Hatherly was born in Cornwall, England, and emigrated to Canada with her husband, Richard Maynard (1832 – 1907), in 1853 at around 19 years of age. The pair lived in Bowmanville, Ontario (then Canada West), where it’s believed Hannah learned photography from R & H O’Hara Photographers. They moved to Victoria in 1862 where they would settle for life and where Hannah opened Mrs. R. Maynard’s Photographic Gallery. In addition to her standard studio portraiture, she became the official photographer for the Victoria police and worked for the government producing ethnographic portraits. Hannah retired in 1912 and died in 1918 at the age of 84.

Hannah became widely recognized for her annual Gems series with which she promoted her studio, releasing a photomontage each year from 1881 to 1895. The photomontages featured children that she had photographed that year and were sent out in the form of new year’s greeting cards to parents of the children. The Gems series was inspired by the fashionable but brief trend in photography known as gems – very small tintypes able to be mounted to jewellery. To create her Gems series, Hannah meticulously cut out and mounted photographs of the children before rephotographing as a whole. The montages often took on the shapes of other objects, including potted plants, wreaths and, as seen here, a painter’s palette.

Hannah Maynard–expert Claire Weissman Wilks points out the theme of grief hidden in the compositions, with many of the Gems featuring ghostly apparitions. For example, this 1884 Gems photomontage features two young girls on either side of the montage who appear otherworldly and statuesque. The child on the left is smiling and holding a bird, while the child on the right is crying, holding a dead bird. This is an early example of Hannah’s practice of what she called “living statuaries”: sitters she made to look like statues through the use of white powder and clever positioning. Grief is a common theme throughout Hannah’s work; a mother of five, she lost the first of two children the year prior to this particular composition.

Hannah’s experiments pushed the boundaries of storytelling through photography further technically and creatively than many of her contemporaries, and predecessors. Although many passionate female photography experts and advocates continue to promote Hannah’s work in contemporary art and education contexts, her superior work remains under-appreciated.

NOTES:

The BC Archives at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria holds a large collection of Hannah’s photographs and supplied the image for this article. Sources for this article include Photography in Canada, 1839–1989 by Sarah Bassnett and Sarah Parsons, 2023; and The Magic Box: The Eccentric Genius of Hannah Maynard by Claire Weissman Wilks, 1980. For more information on Hannah Maynard, look forward to Hannah Maynard: Life & Work, by Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere, to be released in 2026.